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ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS 
PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 




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ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS 
PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 



FOURTEEN ADDRESSES 

EDITED RY 

J. ESTLIN CARPENTER 

M.A., f).LiTT. 



LONDON 

5 ESSEX STREET, STRAND, W.C. 

1916 



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.035 



a. 



>KINTEI> BY ELSOM AND CO. 
JVIAUKET PLACE, IIULL 



PREFATORY NOTE 

The war in which Great Britain is now engaged has 
many aspects, and springs out of a long historical 
development. With its manifold antecedents the 
Addresses in this volume are not concerned, nor do 
they attempt to deal with the various problems, 
social, economic, industrial, international, which must 
more and more engage the thoughts of all who look 
forward to its close. 

But this great tragedy involves many minds in 
grievous perplexity. Not only has it overthrown the 
hopes for the securer establishment of peace among 
the leading European nations which had been steadily 
growing since the first Hague Conference in 1899, ^ 
has shaken the fundamental convictions of the 
righteous order of the world, and the significance of 
the whole evolution of humanity upon this globe. 

We have been placed in a position in which what 
appeared to the Government and the vast majority 
of the nation the only right thing to do, required the 
use of means in violent conflict with our ideals of 
peace and goodwill. Duty seemed entangled in a 
deep-seated ethical contradiction ; one law demanded 
action which trampled on the other. To vindicate 
the principles of international right it was necessary 
to sacrifice the conception of human brotherhood, 
and civilization and Christianity threatened to dis- 
appear in a sudden relapse into barbarism. In this 
dilemma the whole fabric of moral values is threat- 
ened. To help in restoring a firm hold upon them, 
without peremptorily dictating the forms which they 



vi Prefatory Note 

shall take in application to existing political issues 
— a task of which only supreme knowledge and in- 
sight are capable — is one of the objects of this little 
book. 

In the brief compass of a few pages it is possible 
only to suggest lines of thought, or sketch the course 
of an argument. The writers who have so kindly 
responded to the invitation to contribute, have 
chosen their own themes on the theoretic or the prac- 
tical side. They have written in entire independence ; 
they profess no uniformity of view even on the main 
conceptions of philosophy or religion, any more than 
on the personalities and events which have produced 
the present strife. But they are united in believing 
that at the heart of this terrific struggle the moral 
and spiritual interpretation of life still stands su- 
preme, and claims from us unfaltering loyalty. To 
establish its control over the jarring elements of 
national jealousies and ambitions is the task of the 
friends of humanity whether among the combatant 
or neutral nations. May the time soon come when 
their energies can be united, and their aim fulfilled. 

J. E. C. 
Oxford, June 5, 1916. 



CONTENTS 

Page 

The Ethical Problems of the War i 

By Gilbert Murray 

The War and Morality 21 

By Sir Henry Jones 

God's Requirements 46 

By James Drummond 

Aspects of Fatherhood 61 

By J. Estlin Carpenter 

The Alchemy of Sacrifice 88 

By Henry Gow 

God and the World 98 

By J. H. Muirhead 

Belief and Experience 115 

By Philip H. Wicksteed 

A Question that should not be asked 123 

By L. P. Jacks 

Is our Faith Shaken ? 134 

By W. Whitaker 

The Responsibility of Surviving 147 v 

By Stanley A. Mellor 

The Moral Equivalent of War 163 

By S. H. Mellone 

The Nations on their Trial 176 

By H. Enfield Dowson 

Thanks Due 188 

By W. G. Tarrant 

The Warfare from which there is no Discharge . . . .199 
By Joseph Wood 



ETHICAL PROBLEMS OF THE WAR * 
By Prof. Gilbert Murray, D.Litt., F.B.A. 

I SHOULD like before I begin to express to 
you the very real gratitude I feel to a 
body like this in asking me to give this address, 
and thus treating one whose religious views, freely 
expressed in books and lectures, are probably to 
the left of almost all those here present, not as an 
outsider, but recognizing that people in my posi- 
tion are also capable of a religious spirit, and of 
seeking after truth in the same way as yourselves. 
I believe that you and I are in real and fundamen- 
tal sympathy both over religious questions proper, 
and over a question like this of the war, which 
test a man's ultimate beliefs and the real working 
religion by which he lives. I think that we may 
say that probably all here do begin, in their own 
minds, by feeling the war as an ethical problem. 
Certainly that is the way it first appealed to me, 
and it is from that point of view I wish to speak 
to-night. 

1 An Address to the Triennial National Conference at Essex 
Hall, London, Oct. 27, 191 5. 

B 



2 Problems of the War 

Curiously enough I remember speaking in this 
hall, I suppose about fifteen years ago, against 
the policy of the war in South Africa. I little 
imagined then that I should live to speak in 
favour of the policy of a much greater and more 
disastrous war, yet that is what, on the whole, I 
shall do. But I want to begin by facing certain 
facts. Do not let us attempt to blind ourselves 
or be blinded by phrases into thinking that the 
war is anything but a disaster and an appalling dis- 
aster. Do not let us be led away by views which 
have some gleam of truth in them into believing 
that this war will put an end to war — that it will 
probably convert Germany, and certainly convert 
Russia to liberal opinions, that it will establish 
natural frontiers throughout Europe, or that it will 
work a moral regeneration in nations which were 
somehow sapped by too many years of easy living 
in peace. There is some truth, and very valuable 
truth, in all those considerations, but they do not 
alter the fact that the war is, as I said, an appalling 
disaster. We knew when we entered upon it that 
it was a disaster — we knew that we should suffer, 
and that all Europe would suffer. 

Now let us run over very briefly the ways in 
which it is doing evil. Let us face the evil first. 
There is, first, the mere suffering, the leagues and 
leagues of human suffering, that is now spreading 
across Europe ; the suffering of the soldiers, the 
actual wounded combatants, and behind them 



Ethical Problems 3 

the suffering of non-combatants, the suffering of 
people dispossessed, of refugees, of men and women 
turned suddenly homeless into a world without 
pity. Behind that you have the sufferings of 
dumb animals. We are not likely to forget that. 
There is another side which we are even less likely 
to forget, and that is our own personal losses. 
There are very few people in this room who have 
not suffered in that direct personal way ; there 
will be still fewer by the end of the war. I do not 
want to dwell upon that question ; the tears are 
very close behind our eyes when we begin to think 
of that aspect of things, and it is not for me to 
bring them forward. Think, again, of the State's 
loss, the loss of all those chosen men, not mere 
men taken haphazard, but young, strong men, 
largely men of the most generous and self-sacri- 
ficing impulses who responded most swiftly to the 
call for their loyalty and their lives. Some of 
them are dead, some will come back injured, 
maimed, invalided, in various ways broken. There 
is an old Greek proverb which exactly expresses 
the experience that we shall be forced to go 
through, ' The spring is taken out of your year.' 
For a good time ahead the years of England and 
of most countries in Europe will be without a 
spring. In that consideration I think it is only 
fair, and I am certain that an audience like this 
will agree with me, to add all the nations together. 
It is not only we and our Allies who are suffering 



4 Problems of the War 

the loss there ; it is a loss affecting all humanity. 
According to the Russian proverb { They are all 
sons of mothers,' the wildest Senegalese, the most 
angry Prussian. We rejoice, of course we rejoice 
to hear of great German losses ; we face the fact. 
We do rejoice ; yet it is terrible that we should 
have to ; for the loss of these young Germans is 
also a great and a terrible loss to the human race. 
It seems almost trivial after these considerations of 
life and death, but think too of our monetary losses ; 
of the fact that we have spent 1,595 millions and 
that we are throwing away money at the rate of 
nearly five millions a day. Yet just think what 
it means, that precious surplus with which we 
meant to make England finer in every way — that 
surplus is gone. 

From a rich, generous, sanguine nation putting 
her hopes in the future, we shall emerge a rather 
poverty-stricken nation, bound to consider every 
penny of increased expenditure ; a harassed nation 
only fortunate if we are still free. Just think of 
all our schemes of reform and how they are blown 
to the four winds — schemes of social improvement, 
of industrial improvement ; for instance, Lord 
Haldane's great education scheme, which was 
to begin by caring for the health of the small child, 
and then lead him up by a great ladder from the 
primary school to the University ! How some 
of us who were specially interested in education 
revelled in the thought of that great idea ; only 



Ethical Problems 5 

that it was going to cost such a lot of money. It 
would cost nearly as much as half a week of the 
war ! Think what riches we had then, and on 
the whole, although we are perhaps the most 
generous nation in Europe, what little use we 
made of them. We speak of spiritual regenera- 
tion as one of the results of war, but here too there 
is the spiritual evil to be faced. I do not speak 
merely of the danger of reaction. There will be 
a grave danger of political reaction and of reli- 
gious reaction, and you will all have your work 
cut out for you in that matter. The political re- 
action, I believe, will not take the form of a mere 
wave of extreme Conservatism ; the real danger 
will be a reaction against anything that can be called 
mellow and wise in politics ; the real danger will 
be a struggle between crude militarist reaction 
and violent unthinking democracy. As for reli- 
gion, you are probably all anxious as to what is 
going to happen there. Every narrow form of 
religion is lifting up its horns again, rank super- 
stition is beginning to flourish. I am told that 
fortune tellers and crystal gazers are really having 
now the time of their lives. It will be for bodies 
like yourselves to be careful about all that. But 
besides there is another more direct spiritual 
danger. We cannot go on living an abnormal 
life without becoming fundamentally disorganized. 
We have seen that, especially in Germany ; with 
them it seems to be a much stronger tendency than 



6 Problems of the War 

it is with us ; but clearly you cannot permanently 
concentrate your mind on injuring your fellow 
creatures without habituating yourself to evil 
thoughts. In Germany, of course, there is a 
deliberate cult of hatred. There is a process, 
which I will not stop to analyse, a process utterly 
amazing, by which a highly civilized and ordin- 
arily humane nation has gone on from what I can 
only call atrocity to atrocity. How these people 
have ever induced themselves to commit the 
crimes in Belgium which are attested by Lord 
Bryce's Commission, to organize the flood of cal- 
culated mendacity that they pour out day by day, 
and last of all to stand by passive and apparently 
approving, while deeds like the new Armenian 
massacres are going on under their aegis and in 
the very presence of their Consuls, all this passes 
one's imagination. Now we do not act like that ; 
there is something or other in the English nature 
which will not allow it. We shall show anger and 
passion, but we are probably not capable of that 
organized cruelty, and I hope we never shall be. 
Yet the same forces are at work among us. I do 
not want to dwell upon this subject too long ; but 
when people talk of national regeneration or the 
reverse, there is one very obvious and plain test 
which one looks at first, and that is the national 
drink bill. We have made a great effort to 
restrain our drinking ; large numbers of people 
have given up consuming wine and spirits alto- 



Ethical Problems 7 

gether, following the King's example. We have 
made a great effort and what is the result ? The 
drink bill is up seven millions as compared with 
the last year of peace ! That seven millions is 
partly due to the increased price ; but at the old 
prices it would still be up rather over two millions. 
And ahead, at the end of all this long trial, what 
prospect is there ? There is sure to be poverty 
and unemployment, great and long continued, 
just as there was after 1815. I trust we shall be 
better able to face it ; we shall have thought out 
the difficulties more ; we who are left with any 
reasonable margin of subsistence will, I hope, be 
more generous and more clear-sighted than our 
ancestors a century earlier. But in any case there 
is coming a time of great social distress and very 
little money indeed to meet it with. We shall 
achieve no doubt peace in Europe, we shall have 
probably some better arrangement of frontiers, 
but underneath the peace there will be terrific 
hatred. And in the heart of Europe, instead of 
a treacherous and grasping neighbour we shall 
be left with a deadly enemy, living for revenge. 

Now, ladies and gentlemen, I do not think that 
I have shirked the indictment of this war. It is a 
terrible indictment ; and you will ask me perhaps, 
after that description, if I still believe that our 
policy in declaring war was right. Yes, I do. 
Have I any doubt in any corner of my mind that 
the war was right ? I have none. We took the 



8 Problems of the War 

path of duty and the only path we could take. 
Some people speak now as if going on with the 
war was a kind of indulgence of our evil passions. 
The war is not an indulgence of our evil passions ; 
the war is a martyrdom. 

Now, let us not exaggerate here. It is not a 
martyrdom for Christianity. I saw a phrase 
quoted the other day, claiming that we were fight- 
ing for the nailed hand of One crucified against 
the ' mailed fist.' That description is an ideal a 
man may carry in his own heart, but, of course, it 
is an exaggeration to apply to our national position, 
to the position of any nation in international poli- 
tics. We are not saints, we are not a nation of early 
Christians. Yet we are fighting for a great cause. 
How shall I express it ? We are a country of ripe 
political experience, of ancient freedom ; we are, 
with all our faults, I think, a country of kindly 
record and generous ideals, and we stand for the 
established tradition of good behaviour between 
nations. We stand for the observance of treaties 
and the recognition of mutual rights, for the tradi- 
tion of common honesty and common kindliness 
between nation and nation ; we stand for the old 
decencies, the old humanities, * the old ordinance, 5 
as the King's letter put it, ' the old ordinance that 
has bound civilized Europe together.' And against 
us there is a power which, as the King says, has 
changed that ordinance. Europe is no longer held 
together by the old decencies as it was. The 



Ethical Problems 9 

enemy has substituted for it some rule which we 
cannot yet fathom to its full depth. You can 
call it militarism or Realpolitik if you like ; it 
seems to involve the domination of force and 
fraud, it seems to involve organized ruthlessness, 
organized terrorism, organized mendacity. The 
phrase that comes back to my mind when I think 
of it is Mr. Gladstone's description of another evil 
rule — it is the negation of God erected into a 
system of government. The sort of thing for 
which we are righting, the old ordinance, the old 
kindliness and the old humanities — is it too much 
to say that, if there is God in man, it is in these 
things after all that God in man speaks ? 

The old ordinance is illogical. Of course it is 
illogical. It means that civilized human beings in 
the midst of their greatest passions, in the midst of 
their angers and rages, feel that there is something 
deeper, something more important than war or 
victory — that at the bottom of all strife there are 
some remnants of human brotherhood. Now, I 
do not want to go into a long list of German atro- 
cities ; much less do I want to denounce the 
enemy. As Mr. Balfour put it in his whimsical 
way : * We take our enemy as we find him.' But 
it has been the method throughout this war — the 
method the enemy has followed, to go at each step 
outside the old conventions. We have sometimes 
followed. Sometimes we have had to follow. But 
the whole history of the war is a history of that 



io Problems of the War 

process. The peoples fought according to certain 
rules but one people got outside the rules right 
from the beginning. The broken treaty, the cal- 
culated ferocity in Belgium and Northern France, 
the killing of women and non-combatants by sea 
and land and air, the shelling of hospitals, the 
treatment of wounded prisoners in ways they had 
never expected ; all the doctoring of weapons with 
a view to torture ; the explosive bullets ; the pro- 
jectiles doctored with substances which would 
produce a gangrenous wound ; the poisoned gases ; 
the infected wells. It is the same method through- 
out. The old conventions of humanity, the old 
arrangements which admitted that beneath our 
cruelties, beneath our hatreds, there was some 
common humanity and friendliness between us, 
these have been systematically broken one after 
another. Now observe ; these things were done 
not recklessly but to gain a specific advantage - r 
they were done as Mr. Secretary Zimmermann put 
it in the case of Miss Cavell, ' to inspire fear. 5 And 
observe that in many places they have been suc- 
cessful. They have inspired fear. Only look at 
what has recently happened and what is happen- 
ing now in the Balkans. Every one of these 
Balkan states has looked at Belgium. The Ger- 
man agents have told them to look at Belgium. 
They have looked at Belgium and their courage 
has failed them. Is that the way in which we 
wish the government of the world to be conducted 



Ethical Problems ii 

in future ? It is the way it will be conducted un- 
less we and our Allies stand firm to the end. 

All these points, terrible as they are, seem to 
me to be merely consequences from what hap- 
pened at the very beginning of the war. There 
are probably some people here who differ from 
what I am saying and I am grateful to them for 
the patient way in which they are listening to me. 
To all these I would earnestly say : ' Do not 
despise the diplomatic documents.' Remember 
carefully that the diplomacy of July and August, 
1 914, is a central fact. Remember that it is the 
one part of the history antecedent to this war 
which is absolutely clear as daylight. Read the 
documents and read the serious studies of them. 
I would recommend specially the book by Mr. 
William Archer, called ' Thirteen Days.' There 
is also Mr. Headlam's admirable book, ' The His- 
tory of Twelve Days,' and the equally admirable 
book by the American jurist, Mr. Stowell. There 
the issue is clear and the question is settled. The 
verdict of history is already given in these nego- 
tiations. There was a dispute, a somewhat artifi- 
cial dispute which could easily have been settled 
by a little reasonableness on the part of the two 
principals. If that failed there was the mediation 
of friends, there was a conference of the disin- 
terested nations — there was appeal to the concert 
of Europe. There was the arbitration of the 
Hague — an arbitration to which Serbia appealed 



12 Problems of the War 

on the very first day and to which the Czar ap- 
pealed again on the very last. All Europe wanted 
peace and fair settlement. The Governments of 
the two Central Powers refused it. Every sort of 
settlement was rejected. You will all remember 
that, when every settlement that we could pro- 
pose had been shoved aside one after another, 
Sir E. Grey made an appeal to Germany to make 
any proposal herself — any reasonable proposal — 
and we bound ourselves to accept it, to accept it 
even at the cost of deserting our associates. No 
such proposal was made. All Europe wanted 
peace and fair dealing except one Power, or one 
pair of Powers if you so call it, who were confident 
not in the justice of their cause but in the over- 
powering strength of their war machine. As the 
semi-official newspaper said : ' Germany does not 
enter conferences in which she is likely to be in a 
minority.' By fair dealing they might have got 
their rights or a little more than their rights. 
By war they expected to get something like 
the supremacy of Europe. In peace, with their 
neighbours reasonable, in no pressing danger, 
Germany deliberately preferred war to fair settle- 
ment ; and thereby in my judgment Germany 
committed the primal and fundamental sin 
against the brotherhood of mankind. 

Of course all great historical events have com- 
plicated causes, but on that fact almost alone I 
should base the justice and the necessity of our 



Ethical Problems 13 

cause in this war. Other objects have been sug- 
gested : that we are fighting lest Europe should 
be subject to the hegemony of Germany. If Ger- 
many naturally by legitimate means grows to be 
the most influential power, there is no reason for 
anyone to fight her. It is said we are fighting 
for democracy against autocratic government. I 
prefer democracy myself, but one form of govern- 
ment has no right to declare war because it dislikes 
another form. It is suggested that we are fight- 
ing to prevent the break up of the Empire. In 
that case, from motives of loyalty, of course we 
should have to fight, and I think the break up of 
the Empire would be a great disaster to the world. 
But not for any causes of that description would 
I use the phrase I have used, or say that in this 
war we were undergoing a martyrdom. I do use 
it deliberately now : for I believe no greater evil 
could occur than that mankind should submit, and 
should agree to submit, to the rule of naked force. 
Now I would ask again those who are following 
me, as I say, with patience, but I have no doubt 
with difficulty, to remember that this situation — 
in spite of particular details — is on the whole an 
old story. The Greeks knew all about it when 
they used the word c Hubris ' — that pride engen- 
dered by too much success which leads to every 
crime. Many nations after a career of extra- 
ordinary success have become mad or drunk with 
ambition. ' By that sin fell the angels.' The 



14 Problems of the War 

Angels were not wicked to start with but after- 
wards they became devils. We should never have 
said a word against the Germans before this mad- 
ness entered into them. We liked them. Most 
of Europe rather liked and admired them. But, 
as I said, it is an old story. There have been 
tyrants. Tyrants are common things in history. 
Bloody aggression is a common thing in history in 
its darker periods. But nearly always where there 
have been tyrants and aggressors there have been 
men and peoples ready to stand up and suffer and 
to die rather than submit to the tyrant ; the voice 
of history speaks pretty clearly about these issues 
and it says that the men who resisted were right. 
So that, ladies and gentlemen, as with our eyes 
open, we entered into this struggle, I say with our 
eyes open -we must go on with it. We must go 
on with it a united nation, trusting our leaders, 
obeying our rulers, minding each man his own 
business, refusing for an instant to lend an ear to 
the agitated whispers of faction or of hysteria. It 
may be that we shall have to traverse the valley 
of death, but we shall traverse it until the cause of 
humanity is won. 

And now, ladies and gentlemen, that being the 
cause, we are girt up in this war to the perform- 
ance of a great duty ; and there are many things 
in it which, evil as they are, can in some way be 
turned to good. It lies with us to do our best so 
to turn them. 



Ethical Problems 15 

If we take the old analogy from biology we are 
a community, a pack, a herd, a flock. We have 
realized our unity. We are one. I think most of 
us feel that our lives are not our own ; they belong 
to England. France has gone through the same 
process to an even greater degree. Mr. Kipling, 
who used certainly to be no special lover of France, 
has told us that there ' the men are wrought to an 
edge of steel, and the women are a line of fire 
behind them.' Our political divisions before the 
war it is a disgrace to think of. They were so 
great that the enemy calculated upon them, and 
judged that we should not be able to fight. These 
divisions have not been killed as we hoped ; the 
remnants of them are still living. I cannot bear 
to speak of them. Let us think as little as pos- 
sible about them, and lend no ear, no patience to 
the people who try to make them persist. As for 
the division of class and class, I think there, at 
least, we have made a great gain. I would ask 
you to put to yourselves this test. Remember how 
before the war the ordinary workman spoke of his 
employer and the employer of his workmen, and 
think now how the average soldier speaks of his 
officer and how the officer speaks of his men. The 
change is almost immeasurable. Inside the coun- 
try we have gained that unity ; outside in our 
relations with foreign countries we have also made 
a great gain. Remember we have Allies now, 
more Allies, and far closer Allies than we have ever 



16 Problems of the War 

had. We have learned to respect and to under- 
stand other nations. You cannot read those 
diplomatic documents of which I spoke without 
feeling respect for both the French and Russian 
diplomatists for their steadiness, their extreme 
reasonableness, their entire loyalty, and as you 
study them you are amused to see the little differ- 
ences of national character emerging without spoil- 
ing the quality of the work. Since the war has 
come on we have learned to admire other nations. 
There is no man in England who will ever again in 
his heart dare to speak slightingly or with contempt 
of Belgium or Serbia. It is something that we 
have had our hearts opened, that we, who were 
rather an insular people, welcome other nations 
as friends and comrades. Nay, more, we made 
these alliances originally on a special principle 
about which I would like to say a sentence or two. 
That is the principle of Entente, or cordial under- 
standing, which is specially connected with the 
name of our present Foreign Secretary, and, to 
a slighter extent, with that of his predecessor. 
The principle of Entente has been explained by 
Sir Edward Grey several times, but I take two 
phrases of his own particularly. It began be- 
cause he found that all experience had shown that 
for great empires which were touching each other, 
1 whose interests rubbed one against another fre- 
quently in different parts of the world, there was 
no middle course between continual liability to 



Ethical Problems 17 

friction and cordial friendship.' He succeeded in 
establishing that relation of perfect frankness and 
mutual friendship with the two great empires with 
whom our interests were always rubbing. In- 
stead of friction, instead of suspicion and intrigue, 
we established with our two old rivals a permanent 
habit of fair dealing, frankness, and goodwill. The 
second great principle of the Entente was this, 
that ' there is nothing exclusive in these friend- 
ships.' We began it with France, we continued 
it with Russia, we achieved it in reality although 
not in actual diplomatic name with the United 
States, and practically also with Italy, and any 
one who has read the diplomatic history will see 
the effort upon effort we made to establish it with 
our present enemies. I think we have here some 
real basis for a sort of Alliance of Europe — that 
sort of better Concert for which we all hope. One 
cannot guess details. It is very likely indeed that 
at the beginning Germany will stay outside and 
will refuse to come into our kind of concert. If so 
we must * take our enemies as we find them.' The 
fact of there being an enemy outside will very 
likely make us inside hold together all the better 
for the first few years. When we are once thor- 
oughly in harness, and most nations have learnt 
the practice of habitually trusting one another 
and never intriguing against one another, then, 
no doubt, the others will come in. 
Now I spoke at the beginning about the possible 

c 



18 Problems of the War 

dangers of reaction, but there is a very good side 
also in the reaction. Part of it is right. It is a 
reaction against superficial things, superficial ways 
of feeling, and perhaps also superficial ways of 
thought. We have gone back in our daily ex- 
perience to deeper and more primitive things. 
There has been a deepening of the quality of our 
ordinary life. We are called upon to take up a 
greater duty than ever before. We have to face 
more peril, we have to endure greater suffering ; 
death itself has come close to us. It is intimate 
in the thoughts of every one of us, and it has 
taught us in some way to love one another. For 
the first time for many centuries this ' unhappy 
but not inglorious generation,' as it has been 
called, is living and moving daily, waking and 
sleeping, in the habitual presence of ultimate 
and tremendous things. We are living now in 
a great age. 

A sign which has struck me, and I have spoken 
of it elsewhere, is the way in which the language 
of romance and melodrama has now become true. 
It is becoming the language of our normal life. 
The old phrase about ' dying for freedom,' about 
' Death being better than dishonour ' — phrases 
that we thought were fitted for the stage or for 
children's stories, are now the ordinary truths on 
which we live. A sentence which happened to 
strike me was spoken by a Canadian soldier who 
went down, I think, in the ' Arabic ' after saving 



Morality and the War 19 

several people ; before he sank he turned and said, 
* I have served my King and country and this is 
my end.' It was the natural way of expressing 
the plain fact. I read yesterday a letter from a 
soldier at the front about the death of one of his 
fellow-soldiers, and the letter ended quite simply : 
1 After all he has done what we all want to do — 
die for England.' The man who wrote it has since 
then had his wish. Or again if one wants a phrase 
to live by which would a few years ago have 
seemed somewhat unreal, or * high falutin', he 
can take those words that are now in everybody's 
mind : ' I see now that patriotism is not enough, 
I must die without hatred or bitterness towards 
anyone.' 

Romance and melodrama were a memory, 
broken fragments living on of heroic ages in the 
past. We live no longer upon fragments and 
memories, we have entered ourselves upon a 
heroic age. As for me personally, there is one 
thought that is always with me as it is with us all 
I expect — the thought that other men are dying 
for me, better men, younger, with more hope in 
their lives, many of them men whom I have taught 
and loved. I hope you will allow me to say some- 
thing that is in my mind, and will not be in any 
way offended by it. Some of you will be orthodox 
Christians, and will be familiar with the thought 
of One who loved you dying for you. I would like 
to say that now I seem to be familiar with the 



20 Problems of the War 

feeling that something innocent, something great, 
something that loves me, has died, and is dying 
daily for me. That is the sort of community that 
we now are — a community in which one man dies 
for his brother, and underneath all our hatreds, 
all our little angers and quarrels we are brothers 
who are ready to seal our brotherhood with blood. 
It is for us that these men are dying, for us the 
women, the old men and the rejected men, and 
to preserve the civilization and the common life 
which we are keeping alive and re-shaping, to- 
wards wisdom or unwisdom, towards unity or 
discord. Well, ladies and gentlemen, let us be 
worthy of these men, let us be ready each one with 
our sacrifice when it is asked. Let us try as citi- 
zens to live a life which shall not be a mockery to 
the faith these men have placed in us. Let us 
build up an England for which these men lying in 
their scattered graves over the face of the green 
world would have been proud to die. 



MORALITY AND ITS RELATION 
TO THE WAR 

By Prof. Sir Henry Jones, LL.D., F.B.A. 1 

THERE is serious discrepancy between the 
demands made upon us in modern times 
and the moral conceptions and habits with which 
we respond to them. The natural conditions of 
our life belong to one age, and the moral methods 
by which we endeavour to make use of them 
belong to another age. 

I want to illustrate this truth. It arises from 
the fact that when man changes his world he 
changes himself. The objects we live to make 
recoil upon us and make us in turn ; we are 
always in the power of our own inventions. Every- 
thing we produce strikes back upon character. 

Our main boast during the last hundred years 
or so has been our progress in science and in ma- 
terial inventions, and the boast is altogether just. 
There never was such machinery for satisfying 

1 Notes of a lecture delivered at Manchester College, Oxford, 
March, 191 5. 



22 Problems of the War 

the material needs of man. But this machinery is 
running its inventors, as always. The world of man 
is new. The structure of society is altered through 
and through ; every man's character is subjected 
to new tests and new perils : and to meet them 
we need, not indeed new moral principles, but 
new applications of principles which are as old as 
man's search after good. 

I have no faith at all in those who proclaim a 
' New Religion,' and have no least desire to see 
established a ' New Morality.' The principles of 
a good life are permanent. There never was and 
there never will be an age in the world's history 
when, for example, the love which we call Christian 
love is not a master power in the moral world, or 
when justice will become obsolete. I admit with 
all my heart that humanity in the course of its 
evolution needs no new spiritual principles (any 
more than the natural world needs new physical 
laws). None are possible. Time has not power 
over them ; nor has space. They are eternal in 
character and universal in application. They are 
obligatory over the whole of the conduct of all men. 
Reverence for the right for its own sake, the will- 
ing spirit of service of the Most High, that which is 
at once both morality and religion at their best, 
must like the sap of a living tree flow through all 
man's conduct. And it follows as a matter of 
course that there cannot be one morality for men, 
and another, or none at all, for States. 



Morality and the War 23 

Duty, stern daughter of the voice of God . . . 
preserves the stars from wrong, and the most 
ancient heavens through her are fresh and strong.' 

But, on the other hand, principles of morality 
not applied to things of time, nay, which do not 
themselves break out and issue in successive acts 
in time and space, are nothing but empty words. 
They are like scientific hypotheses applied to no 
facts and present in none. But as the hypotheses 
of science in being applied to facts, or rathei dis- 
covered in facts, are not only widened in range 
but deepened in meaning, so also the principles 
of the moral life come to signify more the more 
fully they inspire and control the behaviour of 
mankind. They are the same yesterday, to-day, 
and for ever, but the sameness is neither static 
nor stagnant. We hear of the simplicity of the 
principles of the Christian faith ; how they are 
within the reach of the humblest intelligence — so 
they are : and how they can make the lowliest 
lives most fair — so they can. But on the other 
hand, there is in the simplest of all these prin- 
ciples, which is also the most central, the principle 
of love, a virtue and a potency which all the ages 
of man in long procession, and all the stages and 
forms of human civilization, have not as yet been 
able to set forth in all their fulness. To know 
what love can do we must wait till it has incar- 
nated itself in ways of intercourse and mutual 
regard and service between man and man and 



24 Problems of the War 

nation and nation, whose splendour exceeds the 
reach of our imagination at the present time. 

We are only beginning to evolve the meaning 
and the power of the principles of our spiritual 
life and welfare. For eternal as they are, they 
are not things apart and fixed in a super-temporal 
realm. There is no such realm. It is empty. 
The antithesis of the eternal and temporal is false ; 
for time itself is the manifestation of the eternal, 
and eternity is the inexhaustible possibility of time. 
Time future is not — as yet ; time past is not — it 
was ; but time itself is the unceasing outflow of 
eternity, which itself exists in no other form ; just 
as the perfect is itself not static, not dead and fixed, 
not a God who does nothing and therefore is no- 
thing. The perfect is for ever fulgurating forth 
into new perfections. This means that the dual- 
ism of spiritual and natural, the eternal and the 
temporal, must be repudiated. The moral life is 
neither the one nor the other. It is the intersect- 
ing focus of the permanent and the evanescent, 
of the universal law which is never abrogated and 
the particular circumstance, volition, and deed, 
which are only for the moment. Duty is not mere 
recognition of a sovereign imperative ; it is some- 
thing more and much more difficult. It is also 
the application of the moral principle under the 
conflicting solicitations of circumstance, and obedi- 
ence to the law's command amid the confusing 
voices of the desires and passions, which, more- 



Morality and the War 25 

over, in their own place, have their own inexpug- 
nable rights. * Application ' of law to circumstance 
is, indeed, an inadequate term to express what 
takes place when duty is done. For in it the per- 
manent and the passing, the eternal principle and 
the momentary deed, the spiritual and the natural, 
interpenetrate and take upon themselves one 
another's qualities. Duty is the embodiment and 
actualization of the eternal, the spiritual, the 
sovereign principle — sometimes in very humble 
deeds, as when mercy gives a cup of cold water. 
Indeed there is always double conversion in the 
process of doing right : the law embodies itself 
in a new form, and, I will venture to add, a new 
splendour, when it is obeyed : while, on the other 
hand, the natural deed becomes a spiritual fact, 
the mortal event in mere time puts on immortality. 
And it may be well to remark, in passing, that 
for this reason there is no first or last in the realm 
of morals. Every duty is first, because in its place 
it is an embodiment and representation of the 
good that is highest and absolute. It needs no 
sanctions because all its sanctions are within itself, 
and all the sanctions of all else, too ; for it is the 
source of all values. You cannot assume that the 
State has universal rights over the individual, nor 
vice versa, any more than you can assume that 
one individual has permanent rights over another. 
There are sacrednesses in little things, which have 
a right to challenge gods and men ; and there are 



26 Problems of the War 

individuals, stricken, mocked, put to death who can 
still say that they 'have overcome the world.' It 
is the cause that gives sacredness. Very lowly and 
humble men and women who stand for some causes 
have rights that are superior to the most powerful 
of all States, when it stands merely for itself. 

Spiritual peace and security rest upon spiritual 
convictions of eternal truths ; and convictions are 
assured knowledge, or what passes as such, whether 
it comes by the way of the head or the heart, as a 
result of feeling or of reason. Moreover it is an 
error to speak of spiritual security as if it were a 
confidence that has ceased to reassure itself, or a 
peace beyond strife ; as in a region where ques- 
tions are no longer raised, and there are no more 
duties to be done. Such a peace is not the peace 
of spirit, nor is it even happiness. There is an 
amplitude of activity in happiness, and spirit 
rests only on the wing. The soul of man, like 
everything that lives, lives by constant reaffirm- 
ation of itself, both against and by means of its 
environment : and in a very real sense it con- 
stantly re-creates both itself and its world, carry- 
ing its past into its present, making every achieve- 
ment a new starting-point, and in this way always 
going on into a new country. The soul that does 
not achieve is dying. Its peace, the peace of spirit t 
is the consciousness of the successful application 
of vital principles to new facts, and the constant 
exemplification and ratification of them in new 



Morality and the War 27 

deeds. The joy of the artist is the joy of creation : 
it is not passive only but active, for he both accepts 
and gives. He lifts the beauty of the natural 
scene into the realm of mind, or he lends the silent 
waves of sound that which converts them into 
music, which but for his ear and soul could never 
be. So the moral agent takes up the natural 
event, which is neither good nor bad itself, but 
only the mere happening in the outer world of 
space and time, or the mere natural want or crav- 
ing in himself ; and he raises it into a moral oppor- 
tunity. It becomes a new fact in the new world 
of spirit. And as to the religious man's trust in 
God, and his joy in God's enterprise of leading the 
world freely back to himself, are these not re- 
newed every morning ? The sphere of spirit — 
that is of religion and its God, of art and beauty, 
of morality and goodness, of thought and truth, 
is the realm of life, movement, and even adventure. 

In short the stillest and the most sheltered life 
is life, always active in every part — the daisy on 
the meadow or the violet by the mossy stone has 
to maintain itself against the pressure and the 
invasion of the universe, even while the universe 
is there to help it live. 

Now, contrary to the truth and with conse- 
quences difficult to estimate, so great are they, 
these characteristic qualities of spirit by which 
it finds peace in progress, rest in adventure, 
security in search, joy in the battle, its God in the 



28 Problems of the War 

wilderness, have been sundered in our theories 
and held apart. The rest, the quietude, the 
security, are not supposed to come to those who 
search and strive and venture ; while the move- 
ment, and therefore the enterprise, the joy of 
achievement, the rediscovery every morning of 
the newness of God's ways and the freshness of his 
world, are supposed to be denied to the innocent 
and trustful ; their faith is supposed to know no 
change, their knowledge no growth, and their 
soul to be as a flower shut in the bud. 

It is to this, the presence of adventurous and 
trustful and honest thought in one realm, namely 
that of natural wants and natural science, and the 
relative lack of enterprise in the world of the 
things that matter most, viz., the things of the 
moral life, that I would attribute the tragical 
discrepancy between the demands which modern 
life makes upon us, and the ethical response we 
are able to make to these demands. 

Let me illustrate what I mean. The mastery 
of the modern age over the resources of the natural 
world, has, as I have said, changed not only the 
outward conditions of man's life, but man himself. 
It has changed the structure of society by making 
it consist, for many purposes, not of relations 
between individuals only, but of relations between 
individuals fitted into larger systems. They arc 
relations between groups. This brings new risks 
on the individual, and puts his moral character 



Morality and the War 29 

under new kinds of strain ; and he needs, not in- 
deed new principles of conduct, but new ways of 
applying them. He has to conduct the old conflict 
under the old flag, standing for old rights against 
old wrongs ; but he needs newer and more power- 
ful weapons, for the enemy has gathered strength, 
and his mode of assault is new. 

For, we must observe, individual men and 
women are not merely grouped, not merely col- 
lected together, aggregated, in these groups, but 
fitted together into them. They are reduced into 
mere elements in huge organizations, and too often 
into something like raw material and mere driving 
fuel. Of what ? Of economic groups, that is of 
things, which in a legal and economic sense think 
and will, undergo responsibilities, honour or repu- 
diate their responsibilities, not seldom in ways 
that do not accord entirely with the thought and 
volition of any one of their constituent members. 
The business of the world is not only dominated 
but in very great part done by these complex 
entities (which I would call personalities if that 
would not launch us in another and somewhat 
unmeaning discussion). Now these economic 
units which have such enormous power amongst 
and over men, make no profession whatever of 
having any moral purpose ; and on the whole they 
live up to what they don't profess. They are not 
immoral, but non-moral. If, and in so far as, 
they recognize moral qualities, they do so on the 



30 Problems of the War 

ground that these qualities have economic value. 
I am not blaming, I am recording. It is not the 
business of business, we are told, to be philan- 
thropic, nor to show any other virtue except jus- 
tice ; and it will do justice because from its own 
point of view justice pays. 

Now consider for a moment what these non- 
moral creations (results of science and its applica- 
tions) of the modern world really signify, and ex- 
amine the relations between them and the human 
elements of which they are made up. You will 
find them, I rejoice to say, indescribably better 
on the whole than they were a generation ago. 
But they are still and at best extraordinarily 
crude. It is very rarely that the company's share- 
holders insist through their directors, or the direc- 
tors insist on their behalf, that it is better that 
their profits should be unfairly low than that the 
workmen should be unfairly paid. It is just as 
rarely that the workman proceeds on the principle 
that it is better for him to be dishonestly paid than 
that he should be dishonest in his service. Yet 
these things are morally true ; and as individuals, 
whether directors or workmen, men clearly know 
that it is better to suffer than to inflict wrong. 

Again, if an industrial company contemplates 
a new enterprise, and would establish new works 
in a new locality, for the supply of a new article, 
we know with what care every economic step in 
the adventure is examined. And now, at last, 



Morality and the War 31 

some thought is given to the housing of the work- 
men, and to other conditions of their physical well- 
being. But as a rule these things are considered 
merely from the economic point of view, and the 
workmen themselves as economic factors that can 
be used, preserved or worn out, as schemes of 
profit determine. I am far from denying the 
existence of moderating exceptions. But my 
plaint is precisely that the methods of the humani- 
ties are modifications, exceptions, and intrusions. 
They do not belong intrinsically to the present 
productive and distributive machinery. It is in 
its essence and professes to be economic, and the 
economic (alas !) is at best non-moral. Justice is 
its highest quality, but its very justice has no 
higher character than the harsh impartiality of 
unrelenting natural law, and it is sought by force, 
the result of strain ; and is too often a thing com- 
pelled, which a moral quality never can be. And 
if we consider the relations of these economic 
units to one another, our conclusions as to their 
moral level are only confirmed. The whole sphere 
of trade and commerce as we now understand it, 
is one of competitive strain. It is sustained no 
doubt by its essential honesty ; for without that 
it would fall to pieces ; but its honesty is some- 
times prudence, which is the virtue that calculates 
and counts the cost of doing right or wrong. 

The truth is that the very conceptions which 
rule our economic thought stand in need of being 



32 Problems of the War 

further transformed. Ruskin and Carlyle began 
it, but their work has to be continued. The very 
wealth the laws of whose creation and distribution 
and consumption economic theory explains, is not 
wealth. It is the more or less problematic means 
of wealth. It is a mere natural circumstance which 
lends itself with equal ease to the weal or the woe 
of men. ' Wealth ' has to acquire human im- 
plications. Riches and poverty, individual and 
national prosperity, have to be measured in the 
terms of a new kind of coinage. No business must 
be called prosperous, and no nation economically 
sound and progressive, unless, by means of what 
it produces and in the very process of production, 
men, women, and children, instead of being worn 
and wasted, are endowed with greater wealth of 
soul and health of body, and unless the nation's 
effective manhood is maintained and multiplied. 
But the acquirement of this veritable wealth, 
once the boy or girl has left school or college, is 
not a matter of deliberate forethought or systema- 
tic effort. The rendering of the soul sensitive to 
new forms of beauty, or truth, or goodness, the 
widening of the interests, the strengthening of the 
will, the ennoblement of the character, these are 
no longer pursued in accordance with a thought- 
out plan by either parent or employer. Ethical 
considerations do not often weigh first when we 
select the trade or the profession, nor when we 
follow it. We make over the effects of the pro- 



Morality and the War 33 

fession on character to the care of mere chance ; 
and ' getting on ' rarely means primarily becoming 
better men or women. 

But the combination of men into groups, the 
amalgamation of interests, economic and other, 
which has added so much to our power, brings 
other moral perils. The systematization of the 
affairs of men is apt to mean the systematizing of 
men themselves, the fitting of their body and soul 
as nuts and pins and cogs and cranks in a huge 
machinery. The liberty and independence won 
on the political field during the last century, for 
and by the common people, bears fruit now in the 
most splendid political loyalty. The life of this 
democratic nation is intensely one and single . The 
people when stirred by a great cause has one mind, 
one will, one soul. But the same cannot be said of 
the economic field. There the trend of modern 
systematization is to invade the personality of 
the individual, to waste his uniqueness, to drain 
away the red-ripe elements of his humanity. These 
were fostered when the industries were small. 
Then men, like artists, made whole articles. The 
essence of right conduct is to treat humanity in 
our own person and in all others, always as an 
end and never as a means. But that is difficult 
under modern economic conditions. There is no 
problem more difficult and few more imperative 
than that of moralizing the economic personalities. 
It is a symbol of the ruthlessly systematizing will 



34 Problems of the War 

of Germany, not only that it should be spend- 
thrift of the lives of its citizens in war, but that 
in times of peace the workmen in its larger indus- 
tries carry numbers instead of names. This lack 
of respect for individuality, this horrible slumping 
of human beings as if they were things, this utter 
sinking of the man in men, is in truth a crime 
against humanity. 

Now the modern political State has not been 
regarded by any responsible body of opinion as 
non-moral or even secular, as is the economic 
sphere of man's activities. If it can be maintained 
that to interfere directly (by its legislation) with 
the inner life of its citizens is no part of its func- 
tions, it may certainly count it a part of its busi- 
ness to protect and provide the external conditions 
that favour the good life. Indeed I am not sure 
but that in the last resort it is its only business. 
It is essentially as Plato considered it, an educa- 
tional institution. It is Treitschke who scorns 
the notion that it is an academy. In its relation 
to its own citizens, in fact, the State may be very 
rich in moral value. It may, and it does, elicit 
and foster in them the noblest devotion to the 
best end for which a man could desire either to 
live or die. 

But, on the other hand, the relations between 
one political State and another are hardly more 
satisfactory than those between two economic 
units. Here, once more, the external conditions 



Morality and the War 35 

of international intercourse have changed with a 
momentum and at a pace which have left far be- 
hind the correlative moral habits that should 
control and sanctify them. In times of peace the 
machinery for the interchange of economic ser- 
vices and resources is a marvel of sensitiveness 
and efficiency, and so is the machinery for disser- 
vice in times of war. These are complete and 
powerful beyond the most extravagant imaginings 
of a simpler age. But international ethics, mea- 
sured in any recognized and ordinary moral terms, 
are crude, confused, uncertain, and extraordin- 
arily feeble. 

Consider for a moment what is the normal con- 
duct of States to one another in times of peace. 
' From the point of view of one who really believes 
that great nations ought to behave to one another 
as scrupulously and honourably as ordinary law- 
abiding men, no power in Europe, or out of it, is 
quite blameless. They all have ambitions ; they 
all, to some extent, use spies; they all, within 
limits, try to outwit each other ; in their diplo- 
matic dealing they rely not only on the claims of 
good sense and justice, but ultimately, no doubt, 
on the threat of possible force.' So says Prof. 
Gilbert Murray. 1 Germany (in his view) ' does 
all these things more than other Powers.' ' In 
her diplomacy force comes at once to the front.' 
* She spends more on spies ; she goes beyond the 

1 How can War ever be right ? p. 16. 



36 Problems of the War 

rales of the game in international treachery.' 
* Realism is the fetish of the hour,' says another 
witness. ' Politics must be real or they are des- 
pised as shadows ; and when a German speaks of 
Real-politik he means a policy based on material 
interests, supported by brute force, and liberated 
from the trammels of the moral conscience.' 1 

Not a few of Germany's historical, philosophical, 
and even theological writers maintain that the 
obligations usually called moral should not hold be- 
tween States — are not relevant. And these writers 
(of whom Treitschke is simply the most brutal and 
arrogant) are products as well as exponents of 
their Prussianized people. So that, in truth, we 
have a nation, not unjustly proud of its past 
attainment, and even now professing to aim 
(ultimately) at the good of the world, laying the 
laws of moral life aside, as if they were the swadd- 
ling clothes of political infancy. They may be 
useful and therefore obligatory on little communi- 
ties ; they do not bind the German Empire, and 
have no right to withstand the necessities of a 
self-sufficient or really independent State ! 

Now, neither this doctrine nor the practice based 
upon it is either new or exceptional. Its signific- 
ance (to us at present) lies in the indication it 
gives of the normally low level of international 
morals. I do not know how to account for the 
fact, but it is a fact, that inter-social morality is 

1 Fisher, The Value of Small States, p. 3. 



Morality and the War 37 

always on a lower level than inter-individual or 
inter-personal morality. Men when grouped and 
organized together are readier to do what is harsh 
and merciless, and slower to be moved by com- 
passion, or by any of the more generous impulses 
which keep this world of ours clean and sweet and 
a fit place to live in. Women in factories, men 
aggregated in huge works, tend to draw one an- 
other downwards. 

As between individuals the egoistic ethical doc- 
trine of the middle of last century has been re- 
futed ; and as regards its own citizens the State's 
negative legislative practice has been discredited. 
We know, we have been forced to recognize even 
by Acts of Parliament, that whether we will or no 
we are one another's keepers. But the relations 
between one political State and another are still 
normally frankly egoistic. Each stands for its own 
good — which is right ; but each is apt to inter- 
pret that good in a highly exclusive way, which 
is very wrong ; for it is the characteristic not of 
moral but of natural or material good to be ex- 
clusive. Moral good is always a common good. 
Physically, economically, that is in all that con- 
cerns their material well-being, the interdepen- 
dence of nations is so intimate and vital that any 
country cut off from its neighbours will find itself 
so mutilated a fragment that it cannot continue 
to live. But the moral relations between the same 
States that should go with this interdependence 



38 Problems of the War 

— the consciousness of a common good, the sense 
of mutual responsibility, the generous joy in 
being implicated in one another's welfare, where 
are they ? The moral ties between the States 
are loose, ineffective, and easily snapped. At 
any moment a State will withdraw from its neigh- 
bour, and say practically, ' If thou art in trouble, 
what is that to me ? ' The character of the in- 
vasion of Belgium is denied by no one. The whole 
world knows that it is an innocent little country 
which was trampled in the mire, and which has 
been month after month bleeding and fighting 
for the remnant of its territory and of its people. 
But many States, some themselves small, have 
made no protest, and they call their inaction 
neutrality. They were not prepared to make their 
protest effective, that is, to run any risks. Count- 
ing the cost, they thought it cheaper to stand aloof 
and remain quite impartial as between the suf- 
ferers and the perpetrators of the darkest crime 
of the modern world. 

What an inglorious page in the history of 
modern civilization ! But the significance of the 
fact lies in this — that if the country which called its 
inaction neutrality had not shown a different spirit 
when it thought, or at least said, that its trade 
was obstructed, we— or I, at least — should hardly 
have condemned it. So light are the bonds of 
duty between the States. If we begin to count 
consequences, or debate* the matter on the level 



Morality and the War 39 

of inter-national egoistic ethics, we should find 
it difficult to prove that a country does wrong to 
refuse to be implicated in the rights and wrongs 
of other States, and to be quick in the defence of 
its own people. But there is a level at which 
calculation is absurd, and consequences are not 
counted ; and that precisely is the moral level. 
It is often difficult to know what particular deed 
it is that the moral law demands, but once the 
moral agent recognizes whose voice speaks, the 
question of what he will do is settled. When 
duty enters and speaks and is heard, perplexity 
is at an end. Duty is never weighed against any- 
thing else by the moral agent. There is no bar- 
gaining with an authority known to be supreme 
and free ; and there is no disposition to do so 
when the thing one ought to do is the thing one 
wants to do. And such an authority, which is 
at once outer and inner, belongs to all morality. 
There is no higher or lower amongst duties, except 
in the sense that the former can comprehend the 
latter and reconcile it with itself. Every duty is 
highest. In its own place and context it stands 
a representative of the Absolute. The moral 
consciousness may be subject to illusions ; but its 
essence as moral is that it makes the claim that 
the nature of things is at its back. The least of 
men at his duty is necessarily more than con- 
queror in the moral sense ; even as the private 
soldier at his post, holding in his hand his country's 



40 Problems of the War 

flag, is as sacred as the supreme commander of 
the Empire's armies, and has the same claim upon 
the Empire's power to protect. 

It follows that on this level of morality none of 
the perplexing questions can arise as to the coin- 
cidence of private interest and duty. No genuine 
collision is possible. The good man, who is true 
to himself, is precisely the man who knows that 
the only personal profit worth struggling for is 
the privilege of doing what is right. He is at 
peace, not because he has ignored circumstances 
and consequences, but because he believes that 
he has given them their right value : they are 
components of the moral act. 

1 It is of the very essence of religion or honour,' 
says Prof. Gilbert Murray, * that it must outweigh 
all material considerations. The point of honour 
is the point at which a man says to some proposal, 
" I will not do it, I will rather die." ' It is of the 
essence of honour and religion and morality rather 
that no weighing can take place. Opposed to 
them all other things are * lighter than vanity.' 
The good they seek must be summum and con- 
summatum i requiring naught else to make it com- 
plete, and incapable of being made better by 
either gods or men. Not only it outweighs all 
else, ' what else can be ? ' 

But can a nation rise to this height ? In other 
words can it be regarded as a moral agent ? I 
answer unhesitatingly in the affirmative, leaving 



Morality and the War 41 

on one side the somewhat foolish debate as to 
whether it is a ' person.' There are some things 
which a nation may prefer to its life, and against 
which nothing is weighed that does not become 
light and idle. * No nation,' we are told by- 
Mr. Fisher, * has yet consented, or in the present 
state of public ethics, is likely to consent to refer 
matters affecting its vital interests, independence, 
or honour, to an international tribunal.' I agree, 
and I go further. No nation ought to do so. A 
nation like an individual may consult its neigh- 
bours as to its duty, borrow light from its neigh- 
bours to see what it should do, but it cannot 
delegate the responsibility of choosing. There is 
a certain isolation and sacredness of soul in this 
matter of morality. We can send no proxies to 
meet duty or death. 

But if it is necessary and right, and altogether 
in accordance with the dignity of a political State 
however small, that it should refuse to submit to 
the will of others those interests which are vital and 
involve its honour, it jfe no less essential that it 
should recognize wha;t interests verily are vital, 
and that it should st^ke its life and its honour only 
upon honourable/ issues. And here is the crux of 
the situation. PL very thing depends upon what a 
political State considers to be its interests. Its 
interests may b)e those of a good man, or they may 
be on that no/n-moral level where right and wrong 
are matters \iyith which it refuses to be concerned. 



42 Problems of the War 

I am no advocate of a quixotic altruism. The 
best that we should try to do is simply our own 
duty, that is, the best for ourselves as rational 
beings. There is never the need of postponing 
our own moral character to anything in earth or 
heaven. I agree readily therefore with the Ameri- 
can writer who argues that ' it is not necessarily 
selfish for a neutral State to keep on strictly mind- 
ing its own business,' and that * in following its 
own interest there is no reproach.' * It need not 
involve greed or aggression or ill-will ; it (neutra- 
lity) is simply a question of minding its own 
affairs.' 1 

But what are its own affairs ? Apparently not 
international good faith, nor that rectitude of spirit 
between nations and that mutual reliability without 
which no promise is a pledge, no obligation bind- 
ing. And when, or as regards to what things, is 
neutrality commendable, or possible, to a nation 
whose honour is sacred or whose character de- 
serves respect ? Who is the neutral nation ? Is 
it the nation that will not take by either word or 
deed the part of the known oppressed against the 
known oppressor ? We are told that a certain 
man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho and 
fell among thieves. But we are mot told that the 
Priest and Levite stood by while the man was 
stripped and wounded and left ha v 2f dead, resolv- 
ing to give him oil and wine and tw.o pence when 

1 The Springfield Weekly Republican, Jan.- 28, 191 5. 



Morality and the War 43 

all was over, and then to mediate between the 
robbers and the robbed. That is the kind of 
neutrality which is possible only for political 
States, when they interpret their interests in a 
particular way. 

'Finally, be ye all of one mind, having com- 
passion on one another.' Can it be that this in- 
junction is not binding on the nations ? England 
has been described as ' the habitual champion of 
small nationalities.' In the measure in which 
this statement is true, must we respect her politi- 
cal wisdom ; for undoubtedly she has found her own 
interest therein, and known it better than those 
other States who have said ' If ye are wrecked 
and ruined, what is that to me ? ' ' The supreme 
test of efficiency in imperial government,' says 
Mr. Fisher, ' lies in its capacity to preserve the 
small State in the great union.' And its chivalry 
towards the weak and defenceless and bitterly 
wronged is no bad test of a nation's or an indi- 
vidual's moral worth. What in our history justi- 
fies most our pride ? Is it not that at times 
Britain has risen to the level of pity ? and that 
' prudent and inglorious,' ' neutral and careful of 
her cash,' is not an adequate account of her 
modern ways ? She has understood better the 
interests that ought to be vital, and the matters 
•on which she could throw the accent of her honour. 

She did so, beyond all controversy, when Crom- 
well and Puritan England took compassion on the 



44 Problems of the War 

poor Protestants among the Alps. ' The Lord 
Protector is melted into tears', says Carlyle, 1 £ and 
Toused into sacred fire. This day the French 
treaty, not unimportant to him, was to be signed ; 
this day he refuses to sign till the King and 
Cardinal undertake to assist him in getting right 
done in these poor valleys.' * No English ruler,' 
says Lord Morley, 2 ' has ever shown a nobler 
figure than Cromwell in the case of the Vaudois, 
and he had all the highest impulses of the nation 
with him. He said to the French Ambassador 
ihat the woes of the poor Piedmontese went as 
close to his heart as if they were his nearest of 
kin ; and he gave personal proof of the sincerity 
of his concern by a munificent contribution to the 
fund for the relief of the martyred population. 
Never was the great conception of a powerful 
State having duties along with interests more 
magnanimously realized.' 

If there is in the history of our country any other 
time when her brightness shone forth with all h« r 
ancient glory unobscured, it was when, on fie 
invasion of a small State to which her word had 
been pledged, something not distinguishable from 
true passion for international rectitude and public 
faith welded the mind of her people into an iron 
will for war. Uncertain for a few days as to her 
duty, and divided in her opinion, she shook o l( f 
her perplexity the moment it became a question 

1 Carlyle's Cromwell ', iv. 117. 2 Cromwell, pp. 44 1-2. 



Morality and the War 45 

of fidelity to her word, of common honesty between 
States, of the observance of public law, of the de- 
fence of the right of a little State to independence. 
These things she recognized as standing amongst 
her own vital interests, without which her life 
was hardly worth preserving. The words spoken 
by the great statesman whose wisdom and patient 
strength in these troublous times are as a beacon 
light on her path, found an echo everywhere 
throughout the far-flung Empire. ' What ac- 
count,' he asked, 1 ' could we, the Government and 
the people of this country, have been able to 
render to the tribunal of our national conscience 
and sense of honour, if in defiance of our plighted 
and solemn obligations we had endured, and had 
not done our best to prevent, yes, to avenge, these 
intolerable wrongs ? For my part, I say that 
sooner than be a silent witness, which means in 
effect a willing accomplice, to this tragic triumph 
of force over law, and of brutality over freedom, 
I would see this country of ours blotted out of 
the pages of history.' 



1 Mr. Asquith's Guildhall Speech, Sept. 4, 1914. 



GOD'S REQUIREMENTS 
By James Drummond, M.A., LL.D., Litt.D. 

WHEN we allow our thoughts to stray back 
to the days of old, and read the records 
of antiquity, we are almost startled to find how 
little the deeper passions of human nature have 
changed. Knowledge has advanced with giant 
steps, and the arts by which we can subdue 
material forces to our own purposes have 
reached a marvellous, and still growing, per- 
fection. But knowledge without love only 
serves to increase the misery of mankind ; and 
at the present day a wonderful organization of 
knowledge, industry, and skill is engaged in 
the ruthless infliction of hideous ruin upon 
whole nations. Some speak hopefully of a 
war which is to end war ; and it may be that 
trembling horror before the monster which 
militarism has conjured up will subdue the 
nations as never before into shame and re- 
pentance, and awaken in governments some 



God's Requirements 47 

genuine appreciation of that Christianity which 
they have so long flouted with mocking adula- 
tion. But the baffled expectation of a Divine 
peace is very ancient. Isaiah and Micah anti- 
cipated the time when * the Lord shall reprove 
strong nations,' and ' they shall beat their 
swords into plowshares, and their spears into 
pruning hooks : nation shall not lift up sword 
against nation, neither shall they learn war any 
more.' But then, as now, luxury, jealousy, 
ambition, and covetousness prevented the ful- 
filment of their vision ; and men, determined 
to follow wickedness, made vain attempts to 
bribe God into allowing privileges to sin. In 
opposition to all these things Micah set forth 
the requirements of God in a sentence which 
has been pronounced by Professor George Adam 
Smith to be * the greatest saying of the Old 
Testament.' Whether this be so or not, it is 
certainly one of the grand and timeless utter- 
ances of the true prophetic spirit. It recalls 
us from the vain ceremonies and professions 
which the selfish and superstitious soul offers 
as a substitute for religion, and insists on the 
deep moral and inward character of God's 
requirements. * He hath shewed thee, O man, 
what is good ; and what doth the Lord require 
of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, 
and to walk humbly with thy God ? ' 
The words are as fresh now as when they were 



48 Problems of the War 

first written, and we may derive from them 
some thoughts which may help to strengthen 
us at the present time. 

The first clause, ' He hath shewed thee, O 
man, what is good,' is very remarkable, assert- 
ing, as it does, that man acts against his better 
knowledge when he sins, and, instead of repent- 
ing, offers some fancied propitiation for his sin ; 
and further, that this knowledge of what is 
good is a revelation from God. The moral 
faculty in man has been, no doubt, of slow and 
tentative growth ; but among the more ad- 
vanced races the great lines of morality have 
been decisively, and on the whole uniformly, 
drawn. The divine light, hidden amid the 
darkness of savagery, has been shining more 
and more brightly till, in certain souls, it has 
reached the perfect day. We may say, indeed, 
that all knowledge, however laboriously ac- 
quired, is a revelation ; for the faculties by 
which we obtain it have their source in God. 
If reason is a genuine light, illumining our way 
towards truth, it is a ray from the infinite 
Reason, and every truth which, through its 
patient exercise, we come to perceive, is a 
revelation. But it is in the discoveries of 
conscience that this is most clearly recognized. 
Conscience speaks with a Divine imperative, 
which refuses to be doubted or disbelieved ; 
and it is here in the last resort, that God has 



God's Requirements 49 

shown us what is good. This does not, how- 
ever, supersede the external teaching which is 
commonly spoken of as revelation. All our 
faculties, conscience no less than others, are 
awakened and developed through human inter- 
course. Great prophets and legislators have 
laid down the rules of duty, which we might 
not have unaided discovered. Through them 
God has shown us what is good ; but as long 
as their precepts are purely external, and their 
law is not written on the heart, these precepts 
are an authority, and a very valuable authority, 
but not a revelation. This implies a drawing 
aside of a veil from our own dull perceptions, so 
that we see for ourselves a luminous ideal, and 
are no longer dependent on the instruction of 
the wise. Thus to awaken the conscience the 
appeal of noble character is the most effective. 
For the Christian it is the Spirit of Life in Christ, 
drawing us to itself by the attraction of love, 
that becomes the inward law of the soul. Once 
apprehended, it shows us, beyond all doubt and 
cavil, what is good, the life divine and beautiful 
which is to be the crowning glory of our 
manhood. 

In stating what alone God requires of men, 
Micah sets aside all else as not essential. He 
has immediately in view the abuses of cere- 
monial religion. But though ritual is not 
essential, and is always in danger of becoming 



50 Problems of the War 

formal and worthless, it nevertheless has its 
proper place in the worship of God. As a sub- 
stitute for virtue, it deserves all the scorn that 
some of the prophets pour upon it ; but it may 
be a natural and beautiful expression of the 
heart's emotion, or help to awaken and foster 
the higher sentiments of religion. It was not 
in fulfilment of duty that Mary anointed with 
costly spikenard the feet of Jesus ; the act was 
the expression of her deep love and veneration, 
and to this it owed all its value. And so even 
the old sacrificial rituals, which to us would be 
so repulsive, may often have borne to heaven 
the heart's worship ; but it was the penitence, 
not the outward act, that gave them worth. 

We should further observe that Micah does 
not search out the secret sources of sin, and 
says nothing of those sudden and tempestuous 
impulses which seem to overpower the will, 
and make men captive to sin, giving rise to the 
struggles and failures so vividly described by 
Paul. He is dealing with open wickedness, 
which is under the control of the will. No 
subtle spiritual poison compels the tradesman 
to use wicked balances and a bag of deceitful 
weights ; the rich man, to be violent and 
oppressive ; the selfish, to utter lies, and keep 
a deceitful tongue in his mouth ; the judge, to 
pervert justice for a bribe. And no sinister fate 
drives a reluctant ruler to do unjustly, to hate 



God's Requirements 51 

mercy, and to walk arrogantly with his God ; 
and no thousands of rivers of oil, or of sacri- 
ficial blood, can wash away the enormity of 
such guilt. All these evils are matters of 
deliberate choice, which a man can lay aside 
if he will. The opposite virtues are equally 
within the power of the will. We are not 
sufficiently in the habit of viewing the whole 
tenor of our life in the light of reason and con- 
science ; but in spite of inward faults and fail- 
ings, we can, if we will, direct the outward 
course of deliberate action in accordance with 
the requirements of God. 

What, then, are the Divine requirements that 
thus lie within the power of the will ? 

First, ' to do justly.' The phrase in Hebrew 
is the same as that which is put into the mouth 
of Abraham when he asks, ' Shall not the judge 
of all the earth do right ? '* And again we are 
told that all God's ways are ' judgment,' 2 
where we have the same word differently trans- 
lated. Doing justly, then, is the action of an 
honourable judge, who uses discrimination, 
and renders to all their due. Justice, accord- 
ing to Israel's teaching, is one of the high attri- 
butes of God. ' Righteousness and judgment,' 
exclaims the Psalmist, * are the foundation of 
thy throne.' 3 ' The Lord is righteous,' 4 and 

1 Genesis xviii. 25. 2 Deut. xxxii. 4. 

3 Psalm lxxxix. 14. * Psalm xi. 7. 



52 Problems of the War 

' loveth righteousness and judgment.' 1 To us 
Divine judgment wears an austere aspect, and 
when terrible calamities fall upon the world, 
we speak of them as a judgment. But to the 
Hebrew it was far otherwise. The reign of 
justice was what the oppressed and trembling 
nations longed for ; and the Psalmist calls upon 
the heavens to be glad, and the earth to rejoice, 
because the Lord was coming to judge the 
world, 2 and God's judgments were for all that 
were oppressed. 3 But is not the same joyful 
outlook hidden in the Christian's longing for 
the kingdom of God ? For that kingdom will 
be a reign of righteousness, and justice will come 
down from her heavenly bower to dwell among 
mortal men. Then will the rod of oppression be 
broken, and the cry of the poor will be heard, 
and their wrongs redressed. Then will the 
grasping and selfish no longer be permitted to 
trample on the needy and suffering, and look 
with callous indifference on the tears of the 
widow and the orphan. 

But the coming of this kingdom depends 
partly on ourselves. God acts through human 
agents, and he who loves justice requires us to 
do justly. Justice in man is a supreme virtue, 
and ought to reign as a conquering sovereign 
over all the clamorous and selfish passions that 

1 Psalm xxxiii. 5. 2 Psalm xcvi. usq. 

3 Psalm ciii. 6. 



God's Requirements 53 

drag us down from its calm and holy ideals. 
But though we may have a settled purpose of 
acting justly, it is not always easy to decide 
what justice demands, because, apart from 
any deliberate selfishness, self-interest blurs 
our vision, and prevents us from forming in 
our own case an impartial judgment. How, 
then, shall we make sure that our judgment is 
just, and that we are not withholding some- 
thing that is due to others ? Only by following 
Christ's rule, seeking not our own will, but the 
will of Him who sent us into the world to fulfil 
the obligations which he lays upon us as his 
children. So seeking, we view the world, and 
all its tangled interests, not from our own, but 
from the Divine centre, and perceive in the 
light of God the unclouded face of justice. 
This self-surrender which leads us into the quiet 
court of reason and conscience, where the 
noisy claims of self are hushed, and the still 
small voice of duty is plainly heard, is within 
the power of the will ; and if we act unjustly, 
we cannot plead ignorance as an excuse if we 
never seriously questioned ourselves, or sought 
an escape into that upper air where truth 
reveals herself in all her radiant purity. Thus, 
doing justly involves justice not only of deed, 
but of thought, an unsullied candour of the 
whole nature, which springs from communion 
with God, and makes us in some small degree, 



/ 



54 Problems of the War 

according to the range of our activity, organs 
and revealers of his will. 

If justice is thus a supreme attribute both 
in God and man, it is imperial in its range, and 
is no less obligatory on nations than on indi- 
viduals. 6 Righteousness [or justice] exalteth 
a nation ' ; * and injustice degrades it. For 
thousands of years wise men and prophets have 
denounced the monstrous doctrine that the laws 
of morality are not binding upon nations ; 
and yet that doctrine flourishes as though it 
were the highest wisdom in this age, so proud 
of its fancied enlightenment, so dark and 
brutal in reality. Men who consider them- 
selves the finest fruit of human culture openly 
assert a right of conquest, a right, that is, to 
rob and butcher innocent people, and turn 
loose upon them all the savage passions by 
which human nature is disgraced. There is 
and can be no such right ; it is a wrong im- 
measurable, dark and cruel as hell. All wars 
originate, I believe, in injustice ; but this 
injustice is not necessarily a momentary act, 
and all on one side. It is a constant element, 
creating mutual suspicion and fear, which at 
last relieve themselves in a terrible explosion. 
If each nation could be confident that all others 
were just, we should have no wars ; for none 
would wish to injure another, and, if dis- 

1 Prov. xiv. 34. 



God's Requirements 55 

putes arose, they would be settled by law and 
mutual goodwill. To secure this reign of justice 
must be our ultimate aim. Mere force cannot 
destroy the reign of terror or the longing for 
vengeance. False ideas of national greatness 
must be conquered, and the hearts of brutal 
men changed, not only in Germany, but in 
England and France and Russia. If we win, 
as we hope to win in this war, then we must do 
battle against the evil within our own souls, 
and not suffer evil to evoke evil. It would be 
a sad day for England if Prussia, defeated in 
the field, handed over to us her arrogant and 
unscrupulous ambition, and we gloated over 
the ruin of a great people who have been 
temporarily misled. We must not allow our 
admiration of the high sense of duty in which 
our youth have gone forth to battle to blind 
us to the fierce and cruel passion which war 
tends to arouse ; and while I believe the heart 
of England is sound, there are sinister signs 
which warn us that all the force of Christian 
principle will be required to guard us from 
courses which, in the interests of the future, 
would be not only immoral, but unwise. In 
seeking for just and reasonable guarantees of 
peace, we must put away all bitterness and 
wrath and malice, and remember that evil can 
be overcome only by good, selfishness by gener- 
osity, hatred by love. There are yet left seven 



56 Problems of the War 

millions in Germany who have not bowed the 
knee to the Baal of perfidy and cruelty ; and 
we must endeavour to strengthen their hands, 
and through them to establish international 
relations on the basis of honour and goodwill. 
When all governments and peoples have learned 
to do justly, then, and not till then, Micah's 
prophecy will be fulfilled, that * nation shall not 
lift up sword against nation, neither shall they 
learn war any more.' 

The second duty required of us is ' to love 
mercy.' Mercy is often spoken of as the at- 
tribute which tempers the severity of justice. 
It has been denned as ' that benevolence . . . 
which disposes a person to overlook injuries, 
or to treat an offender better than he deserves.' 
Understood in this sense, it does not imply any 
opposition to the former precept ; for while we 
are bound to accord to others the fulness of 
their just claims, we are at liberty to remit a 
portion of our own rights, and the merciful 
man will listen readily and justly to every plea 
in mitigation of an offence. The word ' mercy,' 
however, has in this passage a much wider range 
of meaning. The Hebrew term is applied to 
another exalted attribute, which is repeatedly 
ascribed to God in the Scriptures, and trans- 
lated ' lovingkindness.' And so far are justice 
and mercy from being regarded as opposites, 
as they have often been in later times, that they 



God's Requirements 57 

are placed together as though one involved the 
other. If justice is the foundation of God's 
throne, mercy goes before his face j 1 if he 
loveth judgment, * the earth is full of the loving- 
kindness of the Lord,' 2 the words being the 
same as in Micah. The term, then, is practic- 
ally equivalent to Christian love. It implies 
graciousness, compassion, considerateness, read- 
iness to do good unto all men according to our 
opportunities. 

A difficulty, however, may occur in the appli- 
cation of the rule. We are required to love 
mercy ; for only thus can it become a pervading 
principle of action, and descend from its 
heavenly throne to abide in our hearts, and 
bring us into communion with the Spirit of God. 
But love is not under the direct power of the 
will, and therefore the requirement may seem 
to demand of us that which it is impossible for 
us to render. But if we cannot immediately 
command, we can cultivate the love of mercy. 
We can reflect on the line of action which mercy 
prescribes ; the deed depends on the will, and 
we soon learn to love that which we habitually 
practise. By yielding to the instinctive im- 
pulses of compassion, by considering the wants 
and feelings of others, by refraining from all 
acts and words that are harsh or cruel, and by 
trying through sympathy to place ourselves in 

1 Psalm lxxxix. 14. 2 Psalm xxxiii. 5. 



58 Problems of the War 

the position of others, we may attain to that 
graciousness of temper which seems to bring 
the air of heaven into our earthly life. And 
having attained and seen how beautiful it is, 
we shall certainly love it, and rejoice not only 
to exercise it ourselves, but to behold its 
activity in others. 

We have seen that justice and mercy are 
attributes of God, so that in doing justly and 
loving mercy we are sharing his transcendent 
life, and showing forth a gleam from the light 
that is infinite and eternal. It follows that the 
precepts before us are more than moral, and 
raise us to the loftiest height of spiritual 
religion. This is brought forth explicitly by 
the third requirement, c to walk humbly with 
thy God.' These few words express two im- 
portant thoughts. First, we are asked to walk 
with God, to live habitually as in his presence 
and in communion with him ; to be holy, for 
he is holy ; righteous, for he is righteous ; 
compassionate, for he has the pity of a father 
towards his children. This enshrining of the 
life of God, as in a consecrated temple, goes 
far beyond the morality which is mere obedience 
to an outward law, and places us under the 
law of the Spirit, which makes the whole tenor 
of our life a spontaneous offering of love. Thus 
we are redeemed from superstitious terrors and 
blind remorse, and enjoy that freedom which 



God's Requirements 59 

belongs only to the children of God who have 
found in their native home deliverance from 
the chains of self. But, secondly, to maintain 
this life even in some suggestive manifestation 
of its purity and grandeur, we must be humble. 
The moment we begin to pride ourselves upon 
it, as though it were of our own creation, its 
glory fades like the baseless fabric of a dream. 
For, indeed, when we cease to be humble, we 
have forgotten God and our dependence upon 
him, and no longer gaze into his unfathomable 
perfections. When, with the Prophet, we 
behold him on his throne, high and lifted up, 
the one Lord and giver of all, we feel that we 
are of unclean lips, and all our righteousness 
is as a fading leaf. Yet it is then, and only 
then, that the lips are touched with sacred fire, 
and holy light shines along our daily path. It 
is thus that he who humbleth himself is exalted, 
and, raised above the deceiving mists of earth, 
sees visions and revelations, wooing him ever 
upward towards the eternal life of communion 
with God. 

Such was the teaching of a simple Hebrew 
peasant, moved by the sin and superstition 
and misery around him to utter the word that 
was breathed within his heart. More than two 
thousand years have passed since, in brief and 
pregnant phrase, he summed up the highest 
faith of Israel. But still his words ring, like a 



60 Problems of the War 

trumpet call, to our age, rebuking its evil ways 
and our vain substitutes for the life that is truly 
divine. And still the nations are deaf to the 
voice of God, and the ancient vision of worlds 
unrealized floats before our wistful eyes. Oh ! 
for the time when the eyes of the blind shall see 
and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped, 
and the ways of God shall be acknowledged by 
all nations to be alone just and true, and his 
kingdom, for which we daily pray, shall come 
at last in power and glory, and the peoples of 
the earth dwell together in justice and love, as 
a holy family of God. Let no man say that in 
these thoughts we are wandering in the wilds of 
an untutored fancy ; for ' he hath shewed thee, 
O man, what is good,' and * the word is very 
nigh thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that 
thou mayest do it.' 



ASPECTS OF FATHERHOOD 
By J. Estlin Carpenter, D.Litt. 

' T "\ 7HY,' I was asked one day by a wounded 
V V soldier in Oxford, c Why does not God 
interfere to stop the war ? ' The same question 
was recently put and answered by an Anglican 
bishop. Reverently, he said, it seemed as if 
God were sitting on the fence, how could we get 
him to come down on our side, and give us a 
mighty victory ? A strange picture, indeed ! An 
Almighty Sovereign undecided about the value of 
his subjects' strife, and ready to be got out of his 
dilemma (to use the episcopal language) if this 
country would take the proper course. 

Such is the crudest form of a difficulty which 
has presented itself, it would seem, to many among 
our countrymen in these latter days. Religious 
newspapers have been full of anxious questionings. 
We are threatened gravely with a dire collapse of 
faith. The air resounds with the cries of the 
sufferers, and in the face of the great tragedy men 



62 Problems of the War 

bewail the most grievous issue of all, and wring 
their hands in lamentation that they have lost 
their God. I will not answer that a God who sits 
on the fence is not worth keeping. Behind that 
unhappy phrase there doubtless lay in the speaker's 
mind some yearning for justice, some distorted 
notion of right, which should sway the divine 
award one way or the other, turn the significance 
of military success into a moral triumph, and by 
a British victory prove that this nation had 
purged itself of evil, and thus justified the ways 
of God to men. 

It must suffice to remark that the picture of the 
providential order which Jesus presents to us is 
conceived upon quite other lines. The scene of 
our existence is maintained with an unvarying 
steadfastness. In the daily round God never 
falters. He pledges himself to an impartial 
bounty which draws no distinctions between the 
evil and the good, but sends its mercy equally 
on the just and unjust. But this elevation of 
beneficence has another aspect. It is one of the 
appalling contrasts of the present war that the 
same sun looks down upon the slayer and the 
slain. The shot and shell which fly across the 
trenches follow the same laws and move with the 
same energy from whichever line they start. 
Through the materials and forces of nature God 
puts his will at the service of the combatants 
on either side, asking no question ' Is your quarrel 



Aspects of Fatherhood 63 

just ? ' Each host, in that sense, can claim that 
God is with them, and they with God. He will 
not divert the bullet from the heart of the brave 
and faithful that stands in its course ; it must 
travel on the path by which it was sent, for God, 
in Old Testament language, is no respecter of 
persons. 

This is but the illustration on the battle-field 
of that persistence in nature which sometimes 
bears the aspect of pitilessness. The storm which 
flings a vessel on the rocks does not arrange that 
only the dishonest shall drown. The earthquake 
which engulfs a city buries within its ruins the 
innocent child and the hardened criminal. The 
plague which desolates a continent enters the 
peaceful home as well as the reeking haunts of 
excess and shame. And yet all through the catas- 
trophes of nature runs a thread of order which is 
never broken. The sunshine and the rain are 
but the visible symbols of a will which binds to- 
gether the mighty energies of the universe into 
one intelligible whole, and sets them on this earth 
for our use. On their stability man's whole life 
is based. Had not God settled whether the sun 
should rise to-morrow, there could be neither 
science nor morals. Here is the ground for the 
education of character. It is by our reliance on 
God's steadfastness in the infinite variety of pro- 
cesses and events around us that we little by 
little gain a footing of security. From the first 



64 Problems of the War 

rude hut of boughs and mud to the vast network 
of social relations in mighty cities and lonely out- 
posts of civilization and the innumerable links of 
intercourse by land and sea, the history of man, 
as he learns to use the powers hidden in earth 
and air and water, is the long record of his trust 
in God, and God's unfailing answer to his confi- 
dence. True, he is environed by dangers, but he 
learns to avoid them ; true, he is encompassed 
by perils, he is invited to overcome them ; true, 
he is beset by mysteries, he is bidden to solve 
them. These are the ways by which manhood is 
developed, thought widened, courage trained, and 
existence raised from the level of the brute to that 
high rank of beings of large discourse, looking 
before and after, which religion fearlessly calls 
' sons of God.' 

Ah, but it is asked in poignant tones, what is 
the meaning of the Fatherhood of God in any wide 
and comprehensive sense when we look at the 
appalling sufferings inflicted upon so many inno- 
cent non-combatants in this present fearful strife ? 
Is it not plain that Christianity is founded on one 
vast mistake, and its chief hope is only a poetic 
dream, irreconcilable with the grim facts of ex- 
perience ? There are various answers to such 
questions from different points of view, which 
may at least mitigate if they cannot altogether 
relieve the gloom which falls with such painful 
moral obscurity upon many hearts. In the first 



Aspects of Fatherhood 65 

place we are apt to be misled by what may be 
called the ' illusion of quantity.' It is true that 
we are witnessing an unexampled outburst of loss 
and pain, of wounds and death, of ruined homes 
and devastated lands, of blighted lives and deso- 
lated affections. Dire facts of incalculable agony 
are daily forced upon our sight ; they mount with 
awful rapidity from month to month into a colossal 
mass of waste and anguish, whose magnitude 
staggers us with its immensity, inflicted with a 
cruelty which evokes passionate indignation, and 
a brutality which stirs an equally passionate dis- 
gust. These horrors are enacted on a scale and 
within a short compass of time which compel us 
to observe them. The Angel of sorrow enters the 
homes of our friends ; the shadow of imminent 
danger hangs over still more. On street after 
street we may see the wounded and the maimed ; 
and it is true that suffering of this kind has no 
parallel, thank God, in our history. But needless 
suffering is not unknown in our civilization. Dis- 
ease which might be prevented takes its annual 
toll of lives which might be saved, were we only 
alert enough, resolute enough, unselfish enough, 
self -con trolled enough to prevent it. Every year, 
we are told, half a million of the inhabitants of the 
United Kingdom contract consumption ; one hun- 
dred and fifty thousand are incapacitated from 
earning their livelihood ; while in England and 
Wales alone tuberculosis in its various forms 



66 Problems of the War 

sends some fifty thousand victims to their graves. 
Medical science is well aware how largely these 
terrible totals may be reduced, but the indifference 
of the community will not provide the means. 
Year after year the lives of tens of thousands of 
infants are wasted, in unsanitary homes which 
ought to be rendered clean and sweet, through the 
ignorance of mothers who ought to have been pro- 
tected by knowledge, in consequence of poverty 
which ought to be raised above the sweater's wage. 1 
More than a generation ago Dr. Norman Kerr 
told the Social Science Congress that the drinking 
habits of the United Kingdom were responsible di- 
rectly and indirectly for one hundred and twenty 
thousand deaths per year. 2 This terrible total 

1 In 1911-13 the annual death rate under one year per 1,000 
births in Farn worth, Burnley, and Wigan was 180, 177, 165 
respectively. At Nelson, in the same county, it was 87 ; for 
England and Wales, 111. Supplement to the 44th Annual 
Report of the Local Government Board, 191 4- 15. In 1910 the 
Medical Officer of Health in Birmingham found that the infant 
mortality among the poor of the city was 200 per 1,000 ; 
among the middle and rich, only 50. Much has been done in 
the reduction of these rates in the present century : so that 
we are told that every year 50,000 infants are saved who would 
have died 15 years ago (Ashby, Infant Mortality, 1915, p. 36). 
But it can still be said broadly that out of every 800,000 chil- 
dren born, 100,000 will die before completing one year of life. 
The births in 191 3 were 1,102,123, implying a mortality of 
more than 122,000. How many more have yet to be saved in 
future years ! 

2 After further investigation this estimate was raised by 



Aspects of Fatherhood 67 

has been reduced by recent enquiry to seventy- 
seven thousand odd for England and Wales in 
1913. 1 We are shocked when we see such figures 
staring us in the casualty lists, we let them pass 
carelessly when we read them in a medical report 
or a daily paper ; it is shocking enough, we say, 
but men must have their beer ; and, it may be 
added, the shareholders in breweries and distil- 
leries their dividends. The conqueror sweeps 
through town and village and homestead with a 
hideous orgy of lust. What secrets of infamy 
does not the night veil from city to city, from 
London to Berlin, in years of peace ; what cal- 
culating selfishness is not engaged in the pro- 
vision for abominable enjoyments ; what cold 
brutality is not masked in false advertisements to 
entrap maiden innocence ! These things go on 
from day to day, and year to year, and generation 
to generation. They are multiplied from land to 
land. They mount with incredible rapidity into 
gigantic totals of physical suffering and moral 
wrong, and no one asks why God does not inter- 
fere to stop them. In other words the pain and 
sin of the war are only the same things more 

him to a minimum annual mortality of 200,000. See his 
pamphlet, The Mortality from Intemperance, 1879. 

1 By Dr. Norman Porritt, in ' A Study of One Year's 
Alcoholic Mortality in England and Wales,' in The Alliance 
Year Booh for 19 16. The estimate is based on the ages 1 to 
5 and 25 to 65. 



68 Problems of the War 

visible, more acute, more intense, more striking 
to the imagination, than the pain and sin which 
are constantly present with us, which attract little 
notice, and from which we can easily turn our 
eyes away, because it takes too much trouble to 
arrest them. The whole mass of the war's horrors 
could they be all rolled into one, presents no greater 
moral difficulty beneath the conception of a holy 
God, than does the sum of one day's normal 
infraction of his laws — nay, than one single viola- 
tion of his rule. You cannot draw a line through 
human doings and say s So much suffering and so 
much wrong can be accommodated within the 
Fatherhood of God as taught by Jesus ; but so 
much more proves it a hollow mockery and a worth- 
less sham.' Either all, or none. The evil is not 
morally worse because there is more of it. If God 
can tolerate one breach of his order, why not ten 
million ? Reason must teach faith to shake off 
the illusion of quantity, and in that sphere at 
least regain its trust. 

But again, the very name ' Father ' itself be- 
guiles us. We use it with every kind of endearing 
but human association. It evokes the image of 
wise and loving and environing care. We recall 
our own childhood shielded from danger, anxiously 
guarded from risk, tended in weakness, protected 
as far as possible from the ills that flesh is heir to, 
the shocks of circumstance, the slings and arrows 
of outrageous fortune. But we look out on 



Aspects of Fatherhood 69 

nature and see no exemptions. Fire burns and 
water drowns and bad air poisons as impartially 
as the sun shines and the rain falls. No hand is 
reached from heaven to save the inmates of a 
blazing house, or arrest the waves which batter a 
vessel driven on a lee shore. Rescue, if rescue 
there be, must be achieved by the fire-escape and 
the life-boat manned by human hands. In that 
sense the analogy of the beloved name is incom- 
plete. God does not stay the ravages of the 
shell any more than he checks the germ-agents of 
disease. If we expect him to change the mechan- 
ism of the universe for our benefit, we look for 
his Fatherhood in the wrong place. 

Where, then, does it lie ? Where, indeed, should 
it lie but in that which is the essential idea of 
fatherhood, at once the fount of being, and com- 
munity of nature ? God is the source of our 
existence, but so he is of stones and stars. But 
we do not therefore call him Father, though the 
Greeks did, in Platonic phrase, * Father of the 
universe,' and so the word stands in the first clause 
of the Creed, ' I believe in God the Father Al- 
mighty, maker of heaven and earth.' God is the 
builder of our frames, but so he is of beast and 
bird, yet we do not call him Father of our dogs 
and hens. He is Father in virtue of the supreme 
privilege of our conscious life, whereby he makes 
us sons, calling us within the limits of our nature 
into the august fellowship of reason and conscience, 



70 Problems of the War 

of affection and will. There lies the proof of our 
kindred, in the moral sphere, as Jesus indicated, 
when, pointing to the serene uniformities of God's 
action in the outward world, he bade his hearers 
reach the perfection of the Father in heaven. 

That was the boldest summons ever addressed 
by one man to his fellows. Jesus has no doubts 
about the capacities of human nature. He speaks 
to the peasant, the fisherman, the artisan, the 
shepherd, and he dares to challenge them to achieve 
the perfection of God ! In the midst of poverty 
and toil he sees his comrades in labour and priva- 
tion under 

' The light that never was on land or sea,- 
The consecration and the poet's dream,' 

invested with ability to resemble the Maker and 
Sustainer of the world ; and he lays on them the 
tremendous duty of reproducing in their own 
being and character the moral completeness of 
the Father on high. That perfection he makes 
no attempt to prove. It belongs to God simply 
as God, and Jesus always speaks of God as known 
by experience rather than demonstrated by reason- 
ing. God is seen by the pure heart, not brought 
into view out of the dark by a dialectical process. 
But Jesus illustrates, though he does not argue. 
He points to what all may recognize, the imprint 
of God's goodness upon earth and sky. There in 
the daily round he offers equal opportunity to all. 






Aspects of Fatherhood 71 

There he puts his eternal energy moment by 
moment at our disposal. There he promises the 
sower who has prepared the ground that he may 
sleep and rise in quiet confidence, till the golden 
grain is ripened and the harvest come. Man is the 
heir of all these bounties. God calls to him to use 
and to enjoy. He plants him, dowered with eye 
and hand and brain, in the midst of a stable order 
which he learns to trust. He opens to him little 
by little treasures of knowledge, secrets of power, 
and appeals for his response. ' Understand me, 
find me out. I am for ever here, I work through 
you and with you ; do you work also with me. 
Fulfil my purpose, carry out my will, sow the seed 
of wisdom and goodness, and reap the fruits of 
joy and peace in unity of spirit with my steadfast- 
ness and love.' 

It is a tremendous opportunity. But we forget 
too often that every opportunity implies a risk. 
In nature the risks are manifold, and it is no part 
of God's plan to provide us with superhuman 
defences against them. We walk from hour to 
hour amid a thousand dangers. The sun-lit air 
may be full of peril, the stagnant pool breeds 
fever, the insect on the wing may carry death. 
The villager who builds on the slopes of a volcano 
may perish in an eruption. The miner who goes 
down into the pit in the morning, knows not 
whether he ma;y not be carried out ere night 
mutilated by the falling of a tunnel, or a corpse 



/ 



72 Problems or the War 

through an explosion of fire-damp. The sailor 
battles with the storm and relies on seamanship 
and skill to save his ship. We do not expect God 
to interfere to save us from the risks attached to 
our use of the fixed order of his ways. We know 
that these are the conditions under which he puts 
the powers of nature within the range of our 
thought and will. He does not abate their hard- 
ness, or ease their severity. The tower of Siloam 
fell when its supports gave way, indifferent 
whether those it crushed were sinners or devout. 
It has indeed been recently argued by an eminent 
scholar that an American liner which narrowly 
escaped being blown up by a mine off the coast of 
Ireland near the beginning of the war, was saved 
by a special act of Providence. Where, then, was 
Providence while the floor of the North Sea has 
been sown with wrecks from the same cause, and 
the Maloja went down in sight of Dover with its 
precious freight of souls ? No, once more, our 
belief in the Fatherhood of God is not an in- 
surance against danger, a defence against the con- 
sequences of unintentional intrusion into his ways, 
or ignorant violations of his order. It does not 
even guard us from the plots and terrors of man. 
It is no shield from aggression, or charm against 
cruelty. It leaves us exposed to all the shafts of 
wickedness, it stays no fury oi attack against the 
innocent. And yet it is the deepest thing in our 
life, the priceless blessing of our souls, the secret 



Aspects of Fatherhood 73 

assurance of our fulfilment of his purpose, the 
ground of our hope of immortality. For though 
the summons of Jesus carried with it no immunity 
from pain or loss, it leaps implicitly through death 
and plants us in the midst of God's eternity. We 
do not reach the fulness of our being here. The 
brave young lives arrested in the trenches pass 
from our sight to advance another stage in the 
great march to completeness otherwhere. 

Ah, but it is said, how unlike the fathers that 
we know, who watch over the first steps of our 
infancy, whose forethought is continually on the 
alert to secure the safety and promote the welfare 
of their children ! Like all resemblances between 
the finite and the infinite, the analogy is of necess- 
ity defective. This piece of work that we call 
man is wrought by God ; but we do not think of 
him as having the same parts as our persons, and 
speak but in figures when we place ourselves 
beneath his eye, or lay our burdens of sin or trouble 
at his feet. The endowments of our inner life are 
the signs and proofs of his fatherhood, as our in- 
telligence is framed to match the thought that 
pervades the scene around us, and our energies 
move or act at our command in conflict or in har- 
mony with his. And as in the home the father 
guides the opening mind and watches the unfold- 
ing character, to check wayward passion and 
develop self-control, to strengthen the trembling 
endeavour and win obedience and loyalty by love, 



74 Problems of the War 

so in the larger field of human life does the Father 
in heaven provide the helps and promptings and 
restraints needful for the discipline of souls. 

Vast, indeed, is the sphere of the education of 
humanity. All kinds of powers are lodged in 
our nature. Many of them remain long unknown, 
and only slowly do we learn their use. But gradu- 
ally the chambers of our being are unlocked, and 
treasures of beauty, wisdom, good, are made 
known to us. They carry with them various 
values, and they soon claim allegiance above the 
appetites and impulses of our common life. In 
this variety we grow to clearer apprehension of 
their several worth. All that is true and worship- 
ful, just, pure and lovely and of good report, calls 
to us, ' Give us room, make a fair place for us, we 
are here to serve you, neglect us not, or we shall 
pass unheeded from your sight and come no more.' 
But no constraint is put upon us. No mechanical 
control grips and compels us. We move about in 
worlds unrealized, and we find that the making of 
good or evil lies in our hands. We are the authors 
of our destinies. We are the creators of our own 
future characters. We are the builders of the city 
of God which the Father is for ever rearing as a 
home for souls in our midst. To us he shows a 
little portion of his mighty plan. To us from 
time to time he imparts suggestions in widening 
horizons, in increasing clearness, giving to those 
who have eyes to see enlarging visions of human 



Aspects of Fatherhood 75 

welfare, and to those who have skill to plan and 
will to resolve expanding power to fulfil them. 
But no necessity encompasses us, for obligation 
is not compulsion. 8 1 ought ' is not the same as 
' I must ' ; the methods of physical causation do 
not bind the soul. God opens before us infinite 
possibilities ; he offers us innumerable options ; 
he initiates in each new individual a far-reaching 
range of experiment. There are perils and pit- 
falls as there are also shelters and helps. But we 
must bear the consequences of our own mistakes. 
The issues of error cannot be evaded. And so 
complicated is the nexus of affairs that a single 
decision may drag ruin in its train, and spread its 
ghastly issues all around the globe. 

What hope, then, it is asked, is there for a 
favourable result ? What security have we that 
the forces of evil in man may not bear down the 
powers of good ? If these immense responsibili- 
ties are entrusted to him, may not the burden be 
more than he can bear ? May he not sink be- 
neath onsets of passion which he can no longer 
resist ? If he is called to work out his own salva- 
tion, is there any assurance that he will succeed ? 
Is it not conceivable that his dreams may fade, 
his visions vanish, his endeavours droop, his aims 
degenerate ? If his command over nature is ex- 
tended, may not increasing corruption of the heart 
make his last state worse than the first ? 

To those who have implicitly believed the uni- 



76 Problems of the War 

verse to be rational, and yet are haunted in the 
midst of the present agony by the fear of the utter 
ruin of all their expectations for the future of 
humanity, it may be replied that if God made 
man, designing him to attain certain ends, he 
knew (in plain language) what he was about. In 
other words may we not believe that the courses 
of human evolution are not left without some safe- 
guards, so that man's choices shall gradually fall 
more and more decisively on the right side ? I 
will not dare to speak of this in the divine sphere, 
or presume to measure the aids which God may 
vouchsafe, or the graces which he may bestow 
from time to time during man's long ascent to- 
wards the light. But I will appeal to the elemen- 
tal facts of our common experience. In the moral 
struggles in which we are from time to time in- 
volved, what is our real attitude towards the con- 
flicting impulses of good and evil ? Do we not 
recognize, if not at the time when we are hurried 
by passion into violence, or driven by fear into 
falsehood, at least in calmer reflection afterwards, 
that the self-control which we should have main- 
tained would have set us in harmony with the 
steadfast order of the heavens, and the truth to 
which we owed allegiance was rooted in the very 
being of the universe ? Does not that point us 
to an essential solidarity of good all the world over 
and all time through ? But who can declare the 
same of the evil which he momentarily chooses, 



Aspects of Fatherhood jj 

and afterwards so bitterly repents ? Who will 
affirm that in fitful gusts of anger or in secret 
plans of selfishness he recognizes a communion 
with any permanent or enduring power ? It is 
the character of our better choices that they all 
converge upon some higher, wider, vaster good, 
which for ever enlarges its boundaries, and wields 
a spreading and abiding influence. The adroit 
schemer may insidiously suggest with Marc 
Antony, 

' The evil that men do lives after them, 
The good is oft interred with their bones, ' 

but the long line of the heroes and the saints who 
have led mankind upon the upward way suffices 
to disprove this melancholy statement. The 
tangles of evil tend slowly to undo themselves 
and disappear. Its forces have no unity. They 
are all in conflict not only with the good but with 
each other. Their energies cannot cohere ; they 
tend to mutual check and final dissolution. Their 
temporary alliances break down ; their connexions 
separate themselves and are dispersed. They are 
of course renewed, but in fresh forms without the 
support of a permanent embodiment in enduring 
shape. But the activities that make for good in 
the pursuit of truth, in the creation of beauty, 
in the achievement of right, are all interrelated. 
They are linked to each other by innumerable 
hidden ties, so that whatever strengthens one 



78 Problems of the War 

group will in the long run invigorate all, and carry 
them forward to reaches higher still. 

But if, as I have urged, we must be on our guard 
against being misled by the illusion of quantity, 
we must no less shield ourselves against the illu- 
sion of time. We can invent no measure of speed 
or lay down conditions for determining the rate 
of advance. Experience does not even warrant 
the claim that moral progress shall be continuous 
or unbroken. Any appeal to force as a method of 
settling disputes is a return to the primitive cus- 
toms of the cave. Such survivals are to be ex- 
pected everywhere ; but they may be found in 
strange company with practice of a wholly different 
kind. How many millenniums of human silence 
preceded the ages when morality first becomes 
articulate in Egypt or Mesopotamia, in India or 
China, it is impossible to tell. We may be certain 
that the period since history began is brief com- 
pared with the previous duration of our race upon 
the earth. What is significant is the sympathy 
of principles of justice and order revealed in 
so many different attempts to co-ordinate har- 
monies of nature and of man. They take varying 
forms, yet they express common aspirations, and 
point to a fundamental unity of experience as the 
basis of ethical education. In the concord of 
heaven and earth the sages of China discerned 
the abiding ground of the relations of organized 
social life. To the singer of the Vedic hymns sat, 



Aspects of Fatherhood 79 

the neuter participle of the verb ' to W identified 
' that which is ' with both * true ' and ' g ood ' 5 
and Rita, the path or course of nature, eh:°^ e(i 
even the gods within its steadfastness, and jW?~ 
plied the norm of virtue for the law-abiding and 
devout. The queenly figure of Maat in temple 
and tomb beside the Nile presented her as the 
impersonation of justice, without whose aid 
neither the sovereignty of heaven nor the adminis- 
tration of the underworld could be complete. 
Shamash, the sun-god, whose all-seeing eye 
renders him the guardian of righteousness on 
earth, gives laws to Hammurabi in Babylonia 
more than a thousand years before the leaders 
of Israel are ready to take up the tale. 

Manifold are the influences which have affected 
the ideals and the practice of ethics since Greek 
philosophy and Roman law provided Christianity 
with modes of intellectual culture and ecclesias- 
tical rule. The new religion was launched into 
the Roman empire with an immense moral en- 
thusiasm which finally secured its victory. It 
might be again and again driven into the back- 
ground by the masterful pretensions of dogmatic 
control ; but it was strong enough to survive the 
decay of the Latin civilization, and from century 
to century produced new types of character, to 
match one or another of the Gospel words. And 
some victories, at least, have been finally won. 
Persecutions for heresy affecting life and limb 



7 8 Problem 

.MS of the War 

group will in j> 

them forwp No wars w ^ a & aul ^ e waged among 
But if ■* ce( ^ nat ions in the name of religion. Nor 
agaur ie P ersona l ownership of one man by an- 
w ^er be ever re-instituted where it has been abol- 
ished after long effort and at great cost. Vast 
social changes have been inaugurated in the last 
century to give effect to new democratic ideals. 
The passions and cruelties of the French Revolu- 
tion wore themselves out, but the cry of ■ Liberty, 
Equality, Fraternity,' in which Bishop Westcott 
discerned the appeal of Christianity to modern 
needs, compelled the nations to listen, and in- 
spired manifold voices of latter-day prophecy. 
After the Napoleonic era the Vienna Congress, 
which had so unhappily subordinated popular 
to dynastic interests, arranged for periodical meet- 
ings of the representatives of the Powers. At one 
of these, held at Verona in 1822, a secret treaty 
was drawn up between Austria, Prussia, France, 
and Russia, which contained the following clauses : 

Article J.— The high contracting Powers, being convinced 
that the system of representative government is equally as 
incompatible with the monarchical principle as the maxim of 
the sovereignty of the people with the Divine Right, engage 
mutually in the most solemn m ann er to use all their efforts to 
put an end to the system of representative government in 
whatever country it may exist in Europe, and to prevent its 
being introduced in those countries where it is not yet known. 

Article II. — As it cannot be doubted that the liberty of the 
Press is the most powerful means used by the pretended sup- 
porters of the rights of nations, to the detriment of those of 



Aspects of Fatherhood 8i 

Princes, the high contracting Parties promise reciprocally to 
adopt all proper measures to suppress it not only in their own 
States, but in the rest of Europe. 1 

Grosser violations of national liberties can 
hardly be imagined ; the selfishness of rulers could 
go no further. Who can conceive such an issue 
from the present war ? A century has passed 
since Waterloo. It is an imperfect measure of 
the progress of our political ethics. There are 
periods when civilization seems arrested, and the 
forces that make for ordered advance are thrust 
into the background. But beneath the surface 
they gather strength for new movement, and when 
the summons comes they emerge into the light. 
They do not keep time with our chronology ; they 
break out unexpectedly, through causes hidden 
from our view — who could have foreseen the 
Athens of the fifth century B.C., or have pre- 
dicted the appearance of Wordsworth, Byron, 
and Shelley ? — but they bring fresh ideas into 
action, and impart incalculable impulses to feeling 
and imagination. In spite of many discouraging 
features of our time, we have ourselves witnessed 
not a few significant illustrations of endeavour 
after higher ideals of national and international 
conduct. The deficiencies of our educational sys- 
tem may still be grave, but a comparison with the 
chaos of fifty years ago reveals an immense devel- 

1 Quoted by Mr. Moreton Frewin, The Nineteenth Century 
and After, February, 1916, p. 347. 



82 Problems of the War 

opment of the sense of public duty and goodwill. 
The moralist may look with apprehension on the 
swift increase of wealth and luxury, but each dis- 
covery of a social wrong awakens a reformer's 
zeal, and though impatience may clutch in haste 
at unsound remedies, the conscience of the com- 
munity is stirred to seek a better way. In the in- 
tricate problems that arise on the margin of 
empire there has been a slow rise in standards of 
equity and sympathetic comprehension in dealing 
with native races under our protection ; and wars 
for gain are unequivocally condemned. Who now 
would justify the compulsion of China to open her 
ports to Indian opium ? The rise of the principle 
of arbitration and its application in conspicuous 
instances, such as the Alabama and Venezuela 
controversies with the United States, or the anger 
roused by the attack of Admiral Rodjestvensky's 
fleet upon the fishing boats on the Dogger Bank, 
together with the creation of the Hague tribunal, 
proved that British statesmen were ready to 
initiate methods of amity for the settlement of 
disputes, and to recognize the claims of smaller 
nations to share in deliberations that might make 
for the world's peace. 

Is it not in this sphere of the gradual elevation 
of our ideals, and their increasing influence in the 
education of feeling and the control of action that 
we may discern the operation of what we have 
learned to call Providence ? May we not say that 



Aspects of Fatherhood 83 

it is the power which is continually tending to 
transmute the lower elements into the higher ? It 
is in the physical world the mysterious force which 
weaves together out of earth and air and light the 
plant whose life rises above mechanic motion or 
even chemic change ; which, in its turn, lifts the 
animal above the plant ; and, in fine, using the 
same elements, converts these once again to sup- 
port the fabric of mind, heart, and soul. And 
similarly in the moral world it is the power which 
so links together the vicissitudes of life with the 
processes of thought, the judgments of conscience, 
the impulses of affection, that the less worthy may 
be gradually transfigured into the more worthy. 
It is the secret energy which plays through this 
mighty sphere of spiritual powers, guiding their 
action into fresh lines, so that to those who discern 
it, yield to it, obey it, aye trust and revere it, 
it is always on their side to impart strength for 
righteousness, and make for inward harmony of 
love, joy, and peace. 

In this visible scene, then, what is its meaning ? 
Do we expect that it will guard us miraculously 
against the shocks of accident, the perils of war, 
the sorrows of death ? Is it an amulet against 
wounds, a charm to avert pain ? No, assuredly, 
our belief in Providence — which is only another 
term for the Fatherhood of God — does not rest on 
the supposition that all things are arranged for 
our gratification. It does not alter one jot the 



84 Problems of the War 

mechanism of the universe to save the righteous 
from disaster or overwhelm the sinner with retri- 
bution. It guarantees no immediate victory to 
the just cause, or swift defeat to grasping and pre- 
datory ambition. Does it leave us, then, helpless 
and stricken, amid blood and tears ? By no 
means. You may see it constantly at work sub- 
duing the natural impulses of resistance with 
lowly resignation of all personal claim, or trans- 
forming imperious instincts of self-preservation 
into immediate thought for others' welfare. How 
many a soldier has been lifted by it into steadfast 
endurance of wounds, without a thought of re- 
sentment against the enemy whose shell has cost 
him eye-sight or limb ! How many maimed 
bravely declare that ' it was worth it,' and they 
would go through it all again, for freedom and 
justice and the country that they love ! How 
many more, mourning for husband or lover, son, 
or brother, on whose dear faces they will never 
look again, have risen above the hateful passion of 
revenge, still paraded, alas, in some sections of our 
press, and taken up the burden of grief without 
wrath, not disquieted because the sacrifice for 
which they had made ready has been exacted 
from them ! When some sudden catastrophe 
shatters the happiness of a home, the prepared 
heart is not overwhelmed. The first bitterness of 
bereavement, the wild sense of impotence, the dull 
and heavy burden of abiding pain, are slowly 



Aspects of Fatherhood 85 

changed by a divine alchemy into priceless trea- 
sures of faith and hope and love. In patient self- 
surrender, in daily duty, in constant thoughtful- 
ness to others, God ministers to the meek and 
suffering soul, feeds it with strength, supports it 
with sympathy, comforts it with tenderness, and 
thus transforms the mingled impulses of its first 
passionate hours into the calm of an abiding peace. 
And there is an aspect of war in which many 
noble natures, when the cause is deemed worthy, 
have found its justification. If it displays the 
most hideous side of our being, its capacity for 
ruthlessness and savagery, for brutal passion and 
excess, it also calls forth virtues of endurance, 
loyalty, obedience, courage, sacrifice, incalculably 
beyond our ordinary life. Here are the notes of 
man's sonship, however they may sound now 
jangled and out of tune. In sudden emergencies 
men reach at a moment's notice heights of self- 
surrender, which in the opportunities of our com- 
mon days they might never have achieved. There 
are tests of character, there are conquests of 
temptation, there are victories in trial, there are 
triumphs over suffering, there are ascensions above 
selfishness, upon a scale of dignity, of radiant 
nobleness, of heroic enterprise, which God may 
indeed discern in the loving and lowly fulfilment 
of home duty, but which do not reveal themselves 
to the outward eye. But, it cannot be denied, 
there are also violences of wrath, furies of reprisal, 



86 Problems of the War 

in the ranks of the combatants, and corruptions 
of heart and vehemences of hate and plots for 
selfish gain and intrigues for political and party 
advantage, corroding and debasing the national 
sentiment at home. Who shall strike the balance 
among these mingled products of good and evil, 
or in these cross-currents of human energy charge 
God with the responsibility because he does not 
interfere to stop the war ? 

Whatever grounds for faith we once possessed — 
in the order and beauty of the world, in the testi- 
monies of the wise and holy, in the witness of the 
spirit within — we still possess undimmed. Neither 
the starry heaven nor the moral law has lost its 
majesty or ceased to awake our wonder or our awe ; 
duty is still the stern daughter of God's voice ; 
love yet prompts to sacrifice and silently reveals 
its kinship with the great heart of the world. 
Strife may confuse our vision, but the cloud is 
on our eyes and not on these 'things unseen.' 
One lesson, however, we have learned with an 
intensity unrealized before — the gravity of the 
powers with which God has entrusted man, the 
tremendous conflict between good and evil which 
may rage within his breast, the far-reaching 
issues of his acts, the fearful peril of the corrup- 
tion of the best. The war which man has made, 
man himself must end. Before us stands the 
deathless vision of the kingdom of God, the 
rule of righteousness and love and peace. The 



Aspects of Fatherhood 87 

capacity to discern it involves also the capacity for 
untiring endeavour to attain it. On us is laid 
the task of finding out the way, and on that path 
may God be our teacher. Let no mists of fear or 
passion hide it from our sight. Let us give our- 
selves to it with dauntless faithfulness, and we shall 
be ' steadfast and unmovable,' because assured 
that our labour shall not be * in vain in the Lord.' 



THE ALCHEMY OF SACRIFICE 
By Henry Gow, B.A. 

THE littleness, the insignificance of man, and 
the wickedness and folly of the world are 
the constant theme of the pessimist. That feeling 
is voiced with the most incisive, brilliant, and 
despairing conviction by the writer of the Book 
of Ecclesiastes, and is summed up in the words, 
' Vanity of vanities, all things are vanity.' Man 
is the creation of a day : all his hopes and fears, 
his wit, his wisdom, his affection lead to nothing. 
He spends his little life in fruitless efforts and in 
idle dreams. Whether he is wise or foolish, good 
or evil, does not really matter. It is a moment's 
anger of bees in their hive, a trifling murmur of 
gnats in the gloom. It means nothing, it leads 
to nothing. The universe is utterly indifferent 
to us. We play our little parts, we enjoy and 
suffer, we quarrel and love, we talk of great 
things to be done, we are excited about our own 
affairs or about the affairs of the world. Nothing 



The Alchemy of Sacrifice 89 

comes of it. We are utterly deluded. The best 
men are the most deluded of all. 

The Kingdom of Heaven is no nearer to-day 
than it was when Jesus died upon the cross. There 
is no peace, no satisfaction, no hope anywhere. 

The man who lives for pleasure will find it dust 
and ashes in his mouth. The man who lives for 
power will find it a weary weight of care. The 
man who lives for wisdom will find it useless and 
vain. But the man who imagines some great 
good beyond himself and fights and dies for that 
is even more deluded than the rest. His failure 
will be the most conspicuous because his hopes 
were highest, his disappointment will be most 
bitter because he seemed to have most right to 
claim success. Man is essentially impotent and 
insignificant. He is a miserable failure. Death 
ends the stupid story of his life. 

That is the doctrine of Ecclesiastes, and it is 
well sometimes to look that view of life in the face. 
The universe is a collection of blind unmeaning 
forces ; we are living in the presence of a vast in- 
difference. The best thing men can do is to make 
themselves as comfortable as they can for the few 
years of life which have been granted to them on 
the earth, and to refuse to be deluded and made 
uncomfortable by ideals. 

The whole meaning of religion is essentially the 
stern opposition to that point of view. The funda- 
mental question for all religion is — What think 



90 Problems of the War 

ye of man ? Whose son is he ? Are we indeed 
chance products of something called life-force,, 
mere bubbles on the surface of the hurrying 
stream of time, bursting like bubbles after a few 
moments and leaving no trace of ourselves upon 
the world, or are we related to the divine, sent 
here for great purposes, with powers of will and 
thought and love which are infinitely important 
for ourselves and for the world ? 

There is something in us which revolts in- 
stinctively against the pessimism of Ecclesiastes. 
There is something in us which cries out with 
anger and indignation against that view of life. 
We cannot breathe in such an atmosphere. We 
are prepared to face disappointment and defeat 
and pain and loss, but the doctrine that these 
things mean nothing and lead to nothing, that 
love and self-sacrifice and nobility of soul are a 
passing phase of deluded self-consciousness, this 
is a fundamental contradiction of our inmost 
experience. 

Religion has always insisted on the littleness 
as well as the greatness of man. It has not been 
blind to the strange contradictions of man's 
nature, least of all has religion in its highest forms 
of Christianity been blind to the contradiction. 
It has not replied to the pessimist's view of life 
which insisted on the misery and weakness of man 
by a cheerful pleasant description of man's life 
on earth, and by urging the unreality of evil. 



The Alchemy of Sacrifice 91 

It has not tried to make out that everything was 
perfectly right and beautifully good. It has 
recognized evil in the world as a real thing, it has 
felt the mystery of evil, but it has felt even more 
deeply the mystery of good. 

It has felt something infinitely great and divine 
above and beyond man, and has seen something 
in man which was akin to that which was beyond 
and above him. It has taught reverence for man 
not as mere man, not as standing by himself 
unrelated to anything beyond, but as the child 
of God. 

It has seen in man's love something more than 
he was conscious of, a sign and symbol of a deeper 
and diviner love than is realized on earth. It has 
seen in man's self-sacrifice something more than 
itself, a sign and symbol of a divine giving by 
which the world can be redeemed. It feels and 
teaches that men are greater than they know, 
that we have in us, despite of all our weaknesses 
and sins, something which is eternal, something 
which is only the beginning of a perfect life 
with God. 

Christianity has expressed that thought of 
man in its conception of Christ. There, it says, 
is what men were meant to be, what men might 
be, there is the mystery of God in man, most 
evident and most supreme. 

It was a short life measured by years — what 
most people would describe as an incomplete life. 



92 Problems of the War 

It was a life of constant toil, a life of danger, a 
life of frustrated effort, a life of love without any 
adequate response. It was a life which soon 
ended in what seemed a useless, miserable, and 
shameful death upon the cross. The crucifixion 
might, as it seems, have been so easily used for 
the purposes of pessimism. Here was exactly 
the lesson that the pessimist wants. It is the 
story of a young man full of baseless hopes and 
vain enthusiasms. He was foolish and deluded 
enough to be troubled by the sins and sorrows of 
his nation. He left his peaceful home where he 
might have lived happily for many years. He 
wanted to establish something which he called 
the Kingdom of God on earth. He went out 
into a hard and wicked world under the in- 
fluence of a gigantic delusion. He astonished 
people for a time. He gave comfort to a few 
sorrowful hearts and strength to a few sinful 
souls. He gathered round him some followers 
who did not understand him. Those who fol- 
lowed him must often have been as deep a source 
of discouragement to him as his enemies. His 
disciples did not become ideal men and women. 
They quarrelled with each other, they expected 
him to do things which he could not do, and did 
not want to do. He could not mould even those 
who were nearest to him and who were constantly 
with him in his work. We might have expected 
at least that his own disciples under an influence 



The Alchemy of Sacrifice 93 

so great and good would have been a company of 
saints. 

If goodness is really so strong and uplifting, this 
great teacher ought surely to have been able to 
raise his disciples into a higher life. But he failed 
utterly even with them. Their hopes were not 
his hopes, their spirit was not his spirit, their 
thoughts were not his thoughts. One of them 
turned traitor, another — one of the most trusted 
and prominent — denied him, and the rest forsook 
him and fled when death was to be faced. After 
a year's fruitless efforts it closed with the painful 
death of a criminal upon the cross. No Kingdom 
of God was established on the earth. There was 
no end of misery and sin. There was no judg- 
ment, no divine interposition. There was a small 
movement, based largely on a misunderstanding 
of Christ's nature and message, which grew up 
amidst the decay of pagan religion, and which 
at last developed into a mighty and despotic 
ecclesiastical system. This too has been able to 
do little or nothing for the world. Misery and 
wrong are still everywhere about us. The Chris- 
tianity which has come from Christ has not saved 
the world and cannot save it. Christ's life and 
death are a mere tragic irony. 

It seems as if it were the most convincing proof 
in all history of the pessimist's judgment, ' Vanity 
of vanities, all things are vanity.' We might 
have expected that the life and death of Christ 



94 Problems of the War 

would have struck discouragement, and a feeling 
of the utter carelessness of God, and of the futility 
of all sacrifice and love, into the hearts of men. 

The strange and wonderful thing is that this 
supreme example of apparent failure has been the 
central human inspiration to effort and love and 
self-sacrifice and belief in God. Not even the 
most hardened pessimist really feels that that is 
a convincing proof of the impotence of God and 
the vanity of human life. We do not think of 
Jesus as a symbol of the helplessness of man and 
the failure of love. We do not think of him and 
his fate as a final negation to the question, ' Is it 
any use to give ourselves for others and for the 
salvation of the world ? ' We do not dream of 
saying, as we think of him dying forsaken on the 
Cross, ' Now I know there is no God.' 

His influence is the very reverse of this. No 
one realizing even a little of that life and death 
can cry out ' Vanity of vanities, all things are 
vanity.' We can say those words and feel them 
often amid scenes of prosperity and apparent 
success. When we think of men who have 
triumphed in evil doing, when we think of the 
poor pleasures which often mean so much to us, 
when we think of our gratified ambitions, our com- 
fortable and sleepy lives, our mild respectabilities, 
then the feeling of the vanity and littleness of life 
may haunt us. But when we think of the love 
and self-sacrifice of Christ, of the infinite hopes. 



The Alchemy of Sacrifice 95 

the faith in human nature, the confidence in God, 
which were so strong in him, life is lifted up on to 
a higher plane. We can say ' Now we know there 
is a God.' 

Man's life becomes a great, a wonderful and 
sacred thing pointing to something infinitely above 
itself, full of meaning and of promise, wrapped in 
divine mystery and love. 

We are feeling this to-day in the midst of the 
agony of the world. All that makes for a feeling 
of vanity and delusion and heartlessness in life is 
strongly in evidence. The awful power of evil is 
impressed upon us. Our best and noblest are 
dying in multitudes each day. Organized violence 
and cruelty crush them out remorselessly. Pain 
and sorrow and disappointment are everywhere 
about us. We think with helpless misery of the 
suffering and martyrdom of men and women. 

But the darkness is irradiated by the divine 
self-sacrifice of myriads. The ideal of giving 
everything on behalf of right is paramount in 
innumerable hearts. It is a great and sacred 
thing for any man or nation to be able to say in 
the words of Luther, ' Here I stand, I can no other, 
God help me, Amen.' With all my faults, my 
wickedness, my sins, which I pray God I may feel 
more deeply, yet I know that in this awful con- 
flict I strive and suffer on behalf of freedom and 
of justice and of peace. That is the underlying 
conviction of our young men at the war, not love 



96 Problems of the War 

of glory or of power nor hatred of the enemy. 
There is something in these things which fills us 
not merely with admiration but with reverence. 
It is not mere heroic actions we acclaim. We have 
a sense of the divine in man, of something that 
passes understanding. 

That sense of being right and being called to 
give everything for right in the midst of awful 
peril makes for a deep peace of mind and heart. 
The two things are closely united, the anguish 
of peril and suffering and the peace of being right. 
If I am merely arguing comfortably with a friend 
over the fire, and expressing truths of which I am 
quite certain, and trying to convince him of their 
truth, there is no deep sense of peace. If I am 
doing something in ordinary life which I know I 
ought to do but which does not mean any great 
sacrifice or danger, there is no deep sense of peace. 
I am glad to be doing it, but there is no exaltation 
in my gladness. It is when loss and pain are 
involved, when the present is dark and the future 
uncertain, when a man is called to make the ut- 
most sacrifice for right without seeing the issue, 
without any certain promise of success, that the 
sense of right and standing for right brings with 
it the deepest sense of peace. That peace does 
not exclude hot indignation against evil but it 
excludes all bitter malice, all thoughts of revenge, 
all desire to inflict pain for our own pleasure. We 
are not worthy to fight for good against evil unless 



The Alchemy of Sacrifice 97 

we keep ourselves free from the contagion of the 
evil against which we fight. The spirit of mili- 
tarism against which we fight must not be ours. 
The spirit of violence and cruelty and grasping lust 
of power against which we fight must not be ours. 
The more convinced we are of the evil in the sys- 
tem against which we strive, the more determined 
and anxious we must be to keep ourselves un- 
stained by it. 

Terrible as it all is, full of confusion and sorrow 
and pain as we feel the world to be, there is a 
hidden splendour behind. Life is not mere vanity 
and foolishness. It is infinitely wonderful and 
great. It seeks for the highest, it is capable of 
any sacrifice, it is essentially divine. Our faith 
in God is deepened and purified. * Though he slay 
me, yet will I trust in him.' Life is for us to-day 
no little futile thing. It is revealed to us as 
stern and awful, but great and sacred beyond 
our highest conceptions. 

God help us to go on in confidence and quiet- 
ness, and to find peace through sacrifice and love 
and trust. 



GOD AND THE WORLD 1 
By J. H. Muirhead, LL.D. 

I 

THOSE whose business it is to read philoso- 
phical serials even in time of war must 
have been struck by the spirit of calm detachment 
with which the great problems of thought are 
discussed as though there were no such thing as 
war and politics. This is magnificent and is as it 
should be. But there is another point of view, 
and while philosophers are speculating the events 
of the war may be effecting changes in men's 
thoughts about the world that philosophy would 
have taken generations to effect. For it is useless 
to suppose that men's ideas will be changed on 
everything that concerns our secular life, and be 
unaffected where the nature of God and his rela- 
tion to the world are concerned. It is not neces- 
sary to hold that here any more than elsewhere 
the change will be brought about in its entirety 
by the war. It has, we may be sure, been pre- 
pared for in the general spirit of the time, and finds 

1 The substance of an address given by request as a digres- 
sion in connexion with a course of lectures on Early Idealist 
Philosopy in the University of Birmingham, 1916. 



God and the World 99 

in the war rather the occasion than the cause of 
its manifestation. I am asked to discuss what the 
immediate effect of the war is likely to be on one 
class at least of minds, on this great question. 

We are accustomed to go to Christian theolo- 
gians for the arguments on which traditional 
theism rests, but the first and perhaps the best 
statement is of far earlier date. 

' Let me tell you,' writes Plato in the Timaeus, 
* why the Creator of the world generated and 
created this universe. He was good and no good- 
ness can ever have any jealousy of anything. And 
being free from jealousy he desired that all things 
should be as like himself as possible. This is the 
true beginning of creation and of the world, which 
we shall do well in receiving on the testimony of 
wise men : God desired that all things should be 
good and nothing bad as far as this could be 
accomplished. Now he who is the best neither 
creates nor ever has created anything but the 
fairest, and reflecting upon the visible works of 
nature he found that no unintelligent creature 
taken as a whole was fairer than the intelligent 
taken as a whole ; and that intelligence can never 
rest in anything that was devoid of soul. For 
these reasons he put intelligence in soul and soul 
in body and framed the universe to be the best 
and fairest work in the order of nature. And 
therefore using the language of probability we 
may say that the world became a living soul and 



ioo Problems of the War 

truly rational through the providence of God.' 1 
The grounds for the existence and the attri- 
butes of God here for the first time stated were 
afterwards expanded, first by Aristotle, then by 
Christian theologians, into the well-known argu- 
ments — the need of a first cause, the argument 
from design, the argument from the idea of per- 
fection manifested in our strivings after the ideals 
of truth and goodness. It has been left to our 
own time to experience difficulties of an appar- 
ently insuperable kind in accepting the conclusion 
they present to us. 

To Plato and the ancients generally there were 
two great and standing visible witnesses to the 
existence of a being eternal, perfect, and supremely 
good : the starry heavens above with the bright 
immortal perfectly ordered beings that inhabit it, 
and the diverse species upon earth that could only 
owe their harmony and beauty to the informing 
mind of some great intelligent artificer, whether 
conceived of as Nature or as God. To us all this 
has been changed. We know that the stars we see 
are only a few glowing ashes in a world of matter, 
for the most part of burnt-out cinders, just as the 
animal species are only a few fortunate or perhaps 
unfortunate survivors from a universal struggle for 
existence. If we are to receive the evidence of 
things like these, we seem to have the witness to 
something very far removed from a Creator whose 

1 Timaeus, p. 29, Jowett's translation. 



God and the World ioi 

nature is love, and from a creature whose chief de- 
sire is to imitate his perfection. It is for this reason 
that some have sought to separate between faith 
and science by carving out a form of witness in 
particular revelations of divine action beyond the 
reach of scientific criticism, while others have 
striven to undermine the logic of science itself by 
representing its laws and demonstrations as merely 
convenient but ultimately undemonstrable for- 
mulae for the direction of human action. Those 
to whom these devices seem unsatisfactory, and 
I believe when it is understood what they involve 
they must be unsatisfactory to all sincere students, 
are apt to find themselves in a general atmos- 
phere of uncertainty as to where they stand which 
only requires some portentous and apparently un- 
meaning calamity like the present war to be pre- 
cipitated into active disbelief. 

1 We seem to me likely,' said a philosopher 
friend the other day, ' to have heard the last in 
the meantime of a loving father. There is nothing 
but right and wrong left.' He did not explain 
what kind of right and wrong would be left in a 
loveless universe. 

The object of the notes which follow is not any- 
thing so ambitious as an argument to establish 
the reasons for belief in a personal God. Before 
anything of this kind can be attempted by 
modern philosophy we should have to be far 
clearer than most of us are as to what we mean 



102 Problems of the War 

by personality and as to what kind of personality 
would satisfy us as an attribute of deity. While 
philosophers are in profound disagreement on 
all this, we may point to another idea coming to 
us also in the first instance from Platonic philo- 
sophy which so far from being weakened has been 
constantly gaining strength among many different 
classes of thinkers during the last quarter of a 
century : the idea of our world as the outcome of 
purposeful effort, working at the first in the form 
of physical affinities ; at a higher point in vague 
instincts and impulses ; at a still higher in memory 
and experience, issuing finally at the level of human 
life in intelligent self-directed action. 

' The World as Will and Idea ' was the title of 
an epoch-making book which has proved in every 
department of knowledge perhaps the most fruitful 
conception of our time. The psychological found- 
ations in which Schopenhauer's own interpretation 
rested have no doubt been sapped, but this has 
left us with the problem how, if not in terms of 
pain and pleasure, we are to think of the source 
of this ' vital impulse.' Is it to be interpreted 
as the mere will to live and enjoy at any cost — 
the ' will to power ' of which we have recently 
heard so much ? Or is it the will to exist in a 
way that involves the subordination of the will 
to power, to the will to a good which is not merely 
ultra-individual but ultra-social. The advantage 
of stating the issue in this way is that it brings 



God and the World 103 

it back to a question of the actual facts of the 
world in which we live, and the most reasonable 
and convincing interpretation of our common 
experience. Is it true that science has cast its 
vote irrevocably on the side of the first of these 
interpretations ? Has it proved that the supreme 
principle of the creative will is strife and the con- 
quest of the weak by the strong, leaving no place 
or a quite subordinate one for the principle of 
justice and the desire for good ? 

II 

It might seem as though the commonly ac- 
cepted doctrine of the struggle for existence and 
the survival of the fittest had decided this question 
in advance. It is true that the crude application 
of the theory of natural selection by some Ger- 
man writers has recently called forth vigorous 
protests on the part of biologists. We are re- 
minded 1 that survival in the struggle for existence 
is achieved on the whole not by direct attack of 
species upon species, but by ' natural suitability 
to the organic and inorganic environment and 
capacity to adapt behaviour to circumstances.' 
But this fails to meet the difficulty in so far as it 
still leaves us with the blind forces of natural 
appetite as the dominating factor in evolution. 
To find the full answer we have to look deeper. 

That ' struggle ' has a place and an important 

1 e.g. by Prof. P. Chalmers Mitchell in Evolution and the War. 



104 Problems of the War 

one there can at this time of day be no doubt 
at all. But to admit this is one thing ; to make 
struggle and death the all-inclusive or even the 
fundamental and main factor in the history of 
creation is another. The more we are coming to 
know of the conditions of life, both human and 
sub-human, the less reason there is seen to be for 
this conclusion. The beginning of the reaction 
against the all-sufficiency of struggle in account- 
ing for the sub-human world may be dated from 
Huxley's celebrated Romanes Lecture. In the 
controversy that ensued two things emerged. 
It was pointed out that it takes all sorts to make 
a world. That there may be struggle, there 
must be combatants. If the sheep ate all the 
grass and the wolves all the sheep there would 
be first one large wolf, and then there would be 
nothing at all. This points to what Sir Leslie 
Stephen called a tacit alliance between all the 
creatures as something that somehow goes deeper 
than their internecine wars. Somewhere there 
must be a compensatory system that keeps the 
world in balance. As we come up the scale we 
begin to see how the place of the tacit alliance 
is taken by active co-operation between the 
members of the groups, making it possible for 
the weak things of the world, the sparrow on the 
house-top, the duck in the village pond — said to 
be the most widely distributed species that is 
known — to confound the mighty and to in- 



God and the World 105 

herit the earth. Step by step moreover with the 
power of co-operation and mutual protection 
goes the power of intelligent adaptation of envi- 
ronment, whereby survival is secured and ' the 
balance of power ' in nature is maintained with a 
growing economy of life. 

Human life is not only continuous with sub- 
human in containing from the first the elements 
of co-operation and adaptation of as well as to 
the environment, but has that in it which 
pledges it to the elimination of the method of 
struggle as wasteful alike in respect to the lower 
and the higher ends of life. If the view that 
' man is a wolf to man ' is a libel on the wolf, it 
is much more of a libel upon man. Human 
society begins in the family where the factors of 
co-operation, constructive communication of life 
go infinitely deeper than rivalry, destruction, 
appropriation. Taking it even at its lowest, if 
we knew nothing of human life but the family, 
the motto would read far more appropriately 
' man is a god to man.' It is true that if there 
were nothing but family human life would still 
be 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.' It 
is further true that in the process of expansion 
to tribe and nation, war and conquest have neces- 
sarily played a large part. But even here it is 
probable that peaceful inclusion and organiza- 
tion has played a far larger, and, however this 
may be, that the stability of tribal and political 



106 Problems of the War 

unions has rested far more on the sense of a 
common interest in a life of peaceful labour 
and mutual goodwill than on a mutual or a 
common fear. 

What is thus brought home to us from consider- 
ations of what we may call the natural develop- 
ment of human society becomes clearer still when 
we consider the purposes which at a certain stage 
in that development men come to set before them- 
selves as a conscious aim. I am aware that there 
are those who hold that the deeper motive of econ- 
omic and political organization — of the elimination 
of war — within a nation or group is to be sought for 
not in any principle of good in human nature, or 
in the desire to improve life for its own sake, but 
in the necessity of strengthening the State for 
purposes of defence or aggression in a struggle 
which so far from being really mitigated has now 
reached a far acuter stage in becoming inter- 
tribal or international. But we only need to 
realize what such a view commits us to to see 
how untenable it is. Among other absurdities 
it commits us to holding that human nature can 
accept one principle and standard of action and 
feeling within the bounds of the nation and an- 
other beyond them. 'You may throw nature out 
with a fork, it will ever return,' holds of the 
better as of the worse element in it. You may 
draw men out in trenches by nations with orders 
to hate, to maim, and to kill — a common custom > 



God and the World 107 

a joke, a memory of home, will drive them into 
one another's arms in spite of you. Look at it 
as we may the sentence on mere force as the prin- 
ciple of progress has been passed in the recesses 
of the human mind and will. On the other hand, 
the end has been fixed by the ideal that forms 
the pulse of the activity of both in the fullness 
of their own development, a fullness only achiev- 
able by the method of peaceful expansion and 
inclusion. 

What light does all this throw on the problem 
with which we started ? We may be far from 
the God of the Timaeus, whose essence is good, 
and still further from the loving Father of the 
Gospels, but there are one or two things which 
we can say in the light of it which at any 
rate may, if we so desire, be taken as a step 
towards them. 

1. The things that hold creation together lie 
deeper than the things that divide and set part 
against part, the area covered by concord and 
co-operation is wider than the area covered by 
discord and rivalry. 

2. In human life the principle we are speaking 
of works not merely as a natural affection. It 
works also as an ideal of perfection demanding 
that the world of human relations be so ordered 
that it shall as far as possible be a reflection of 
the fullness of human nature. ' The animals,' 
says Kant, * live according to law, man lives 



108 Problems of the War 

according to the idea of law.' What appears in 
them as an instinct, appears in man as a moral 
order which stands for everything he holds most 
precious : his home, his material possessions, his 
city and country, his art and science, and all 
spiritual powers and capacities. 

3. Of this and of the laws as of the spirit of 
concord by which they are sustained we must say 
that they are no mere human creation for finite 
purposes of national power and self-assertion. 
Rather as Antigone says of them, 4 They are 
the unwritten and unfailing statutes of heaven. 
Their life is not of to-day or yesterday, but from 
all time, and no man knows when they were first 
put forth.' 

4. What to popular theism including Kant's 
is a Divine law claiming submission from without 
may to a deeper view be the witness of the spirit 
to its own higher will. 

' God is law, say the wise : O Soul, and lei us rejoice, 
For if He thunder by law the thunder is yet His voice. 

Law is God, say some : no God at all, says the fool ; 
For all we have power to see is a straight staff bent in a 
pool ; 

And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man 

cannot see; 
But if we could see and hear, this vision — were it not He ?' 



God and the World 109 

III 

But there is the war. It was the challenge of 
the war we took up at the outset, and we cannot 
shirk it here. Putting aside for the moment the 
worst feature of it in the suffering of the inno- 
cent and confining ourselves to the bare fact of 
the material and moral devastation it has brought 
and may still be destined to bring — our question is 
of its compatibility with any theory of the divine 
love. There are those who have sought the answer 
in the general awakening it has brought to the seri- 
ous side of life, the great qualities it has brought 
out, the spirit of sacrifice, the sense of national 
unity, the wholly new standard of values, of which 
it has been the occasion. It is well to have all 
this recognized as a witness to the power of the 
moral order in the world to * overrule ' and bring 
good out of evil. But the evil remains, and we 
shall make a great mistake if in trying to read the 
lesson of the war on this the most important of all 
issues we find in it no deeper clue to the nature of 
our world than that which such reflections supply. 

* It is not possible to bring an indictment 
against a nation,' far less against a continent or a 
civilization, but when the history of the second 
half of the nineteenth century comes to be written 
— along with some of the greatest achievements 
of the human mind, there will be registered, I 
believe, against it a pre-occupation with material 
wealth and power probably without precedent in 



no Problems of the War 

history. It is unnecessary here, perhaps it is 
hardly the time, to dwell upon this point or upon 
its results : the spirit of rivalry that has per- 
vaded the policies of the nations of Europe, the 
oppression and exploitation of weaker nations by 
the stronger, the exaggerated inequalities of con- 
dition in the home population, with all the soul- 
destroying influences that this has brought with 
it of which city slums are only the outward and 
visible symbol. I do not think that this pre- 
occupation has taken the same form or has in- 
volved the same guilt in the leading European 
nations. In England it has been largely the 
result of thoughtlessness and want of imagina- 
tion which in the last quarter of a century (to go 
no further back) she has done much by her social 
legislation to redeem. In Germany, too, it was 
largely unconscious until the ambitions of soldiers 
and politicians and the complaisance of some lead- 
ing thinkers led to the attempt to pervert the 
mind of the nation in the direction of ideals which 
meant the denial of the principle of human fellow- 
ship and the defiance of the moral order. That 
this should have involved the impregnation of 
the minds of young children with the virus of 
national envy and hatred comes surely as near 
the sin against the Holy Spirit as anything that 
the modern imagination can conceive, and is the 
deepest condemnation of the policy of which it 
was a necessary part. We need not forget that 



God and the World hi 

there was much in the circumstances of the time 
to lure the nations on to this fatal path — the sud- 
den start under the influence of scientific discovery 
of machine production, the unforeseen influx of 
wealth, the growth of political power and the desire 
of colonial expansion. Before a higher tribunal 
trying the motives of men and peoples these things 
would have to be taken in evidence. But nothing 
can alter the fact that no analysis of the causes 
of the war can be adequate which fails to take 
account of this great and general moral aberration 
as the deepest factor in them. Where it has not 
taken the form of an organized rebellion against 
the moral order of the world it has meant a lament- 
able failure of insight into its requirements in 
individual and national life. 1 Realizing all this 
we ask ourselves the question could we really 
expect or desire anything else than what has 
actually happened ? Could we really desire a 
world in which the moral order was so inverte- 
brate a thing as to allow itself to be outraged with 
impunity at its most vital point ? Can we really 
desire that great and national sins should be un- 

1 Lest this should seem to the reader a piece of vague 
denunciation I mention a single point : the carelessness of 
the ordinary investor as to the use that is made of his money, 
whether it be to further beneficial industry or municipal im- 
provements or to build public-houses or cinema palaces, 
whether to develop real civilization in foreign countries or 
to support a devastating despotism. See a remarkable 
article on this, New Statesman, April 29 th, 19 16. 



ii2 Problems of the War 

visited with great and national punishments ? 

Speaking for myself I find it impossible, except 
on a thorough-going pessimism, to frame a con- 
sistent conception of such a world. 

I am aware, of course, that an answer like this 
may be said to have left the main problem un- 
solved. Why, it may be asked, should such de- 
partures from the spirit of the moral order be 
permitted at all ? Why, when they have occurred 
should the chief suffering fall on the innocent ? 
We may accept a world order in which the sun 
shines alike on the just and the unjust, but what 
of the hail and the tempest ? The first of these 
questions is the problem of evil in general, and 
lies outside the scope of this paper, but even the 
limited argument sketched above would be in- 
complete without some answer to the second. 

In an age of robuster faith it might have been 
set aside with an appeal to the mysterious and 
inscrutable ways of Providence. To the modern 
mind it seems easier to deny the Providence than 
to accept the mystery. And yet if the view I 
have tried to put forward is anything like the 
truth of things, I cannot see that there is any 
reason why this alternative should be accepted 
as final. I believe it possible by means of the 
method I have already used at least to suggest 
a third alternative. It is a corollary (or is it a 
re-statement ?) of the conclusion of the earlier 
part of this paper that in spite of apparent inde- 



God and the World 113 

pendence of individuals and local groups human 
society forms a solid whole. It is no mere pious 
sentiment that men are members one of another 
— if not bone of each other's bone, and flesh of 
each other's flesh, at any rate mind of each other's 
mind and will of each other's will. We may still 
be far from the condition of sensitiveness of 
which Plato prophesies 1 wherein if one member 
suffers all members suffer with it. But there is 
sufficient de facto community of life and feeling 
to make it impossible to draw hard and fast lines 
between innocent and guilty, and to localize the 
suffering that evil-doing entails. 

To this we must add that it is the suffering of 
the innocent far more than of the guilty that is 
the redeeming power in the world as we thus 
learn to know it. It is not merely that the 
sufferings of the innocent as in the present case 
awaken in others the sense of an outraged moral 
order, but they have the power of touching if 
anything can the conscience of the guilty them- 
selves, and bringing home to human consciousness 
in general the sense of something wrong in the 
established order of things for which the innocent 
themselves are not without their share of respon- 
sibility. 

In speaking of Christianity Hegel makes use of 
the phrase the * guilt of innocence ' to point to 
the impossibility of complete withdrawal from 

1 See Republic, Book V, 462. 



ii4 Problems of the War 

the strivings and the errors of the world without 
thereby incurring a new form of guilt. This may 
suggest to us to ask whether the dogma of vicari- 
ous suffering which to so many has been a stumb- 
ling block to the acceptance of Christianity in 
any form is not in reality the one central and vital 
truth which it is fitted to teach us. 1 

Realizing these facts we may again put the ques- 
tion whether we could really desire anything else ? 
Can we desire that human life should be such a 
thing of threads and patches that joy and sorrow 
should run along the lines our judgments of guilt 
and innocence mark out ? Again I can only say 
for myself I am unable to form a coherent con- 
ception of such a world. Anything I can imagine 
is as inconceivable as the old division of the dead 
between heaven and hell. If this seems to the 
reader, as it is likely enough to do, the veriest 
arm-chair philosophy, I can only ask him again 
to look at the facts. There are thousands at the 
present moment as innocent of the war as he or I 
(probably enough far more innocent) who are 
facing wounds and death and making them 
splendid for themselves and the world by con- 
ceiving of them as for the defence or redemption 
of their country. Is it an arm-chair philosophy 
that leads some to go a step deeper still into the 
meaning of present hardship and suffering by 
conceiving of it as for the redemption of mankind ? 

1 As has been claimed, e.g., by Professor Bosanquer. 



BELIEF AND EXPERIENCE 
By Philip H. Wicksteed, M.A., Litt.D. 

I HAVE often heard people say ' What a terrible 
trial of faith ! ' when a great anguish has 
fallen upon a friend. It may have been that 
a young married couple have been parted by 
death after a few months of wedded happiness ; 
or it may be the death of an only child ; or that 
a man has been laid hold of by a torturing and 
hopeless disease, or has had to see one dear to him 
in its grip, while he stood by helpless. 

On such occasions I have often wondered what 
exactly was meant by ' Faith.' If we mean by 
faith the power of realizing things not seen, when 
the things felt at the moment seem to hide or to 
contradict them, then these grievous experiences 
are indeed a ' trial of faith.' For it is only a man 
strong in faith who can defend the hour from the 
minute, the day from the hour, the abiding from 
the transient, the whole area of life from the local 
pressure upon the point at which he is directly 



n6 Problems of the War 

and acutely sensitive. The man whose faith is 
so tried and who can hold fast what he knows 
when it is hardest to feel it, has indeed triumphed. 
And he whose faith has broken down has suffered 
a vital loss. 

But if ' Faith ' means not a power of the mind 
but some kind of formulated conviction or belief, 
from which a man has been accustomed to draw 
inspiration or comfort, which has given cohesion 
to his intellectual life, direction to his conduct, 
and meaning to his aspirations, then the question 
rises c why should such personal sorrows (if they 
do not unhinge his mind) trouble his faith at all ? 
Did he not know that such things happen in the 
world ? And did he make up his conception of 
life, and of the guidance, or the drift, of the uni- 
verse without including them ? Or had his 
imagination so completely failed to realize them 
that they practically came to him as ' new facts ' 
in the light of which the case must be re-examined 
and his ' verdict on the universe ' revised ? Or 
did he think that these things happen indeed, but 
not to those who hold his faith, or follow his prac- 
tice, or belong to his part of the world ? If this 
be so then it is no wonder that his faith is both 
tried and found wanting, for it was a false faith. 
It is well for him to lose it, even if it made him 
happy. It is well for him to cry, 

Farewell, farewell the heart that lives alone, 
Housed in a dream, at distance from the kind ! 



Belief and Experience 117 

Such happiness, wherever it be known, 
Is to be pitied ; for 'tis surely blind. 

For a man to ' lose his faith,' then, may be 
the tragedy of a weak soul — than which there is 
no sight more pitiable. For it may mean the 
failure to hold the truth against local and per- 
sonal pressure raised to the breaking point. But 
it may also be the purging of a strong soul, freeing 
it from some bondage under which consecrated 
error had laid it. 

If any man's faith is tried or broken by the 
events of the recent past and the present, he asks 
himself whether that faith was reared on vain 
fancies which the facts have dissipated, or 
whether it is that his hold of the abiding truth, 
which still is true, was so feeble that passing 
waves can wrench him from the eternal rock. 
Is the * man of faith,' he asks, the man who has 
not realized the strength of evil or the man who 
never loses his direct sense of the power of good ? 

Hence the profound significance of the fact — 
so obvious that it is even over-emphasized in 
popular conception — that so large a proportion 
of the great souls on whose strength the world has 
rested, and in the inspiration of whose faith it has 
lived, have delivered their message under con- 
ditions of personal experience or social environ- 
ment that seem almost intolerable. Jeremiah, 
Plato, Jesus, Plotinus, Boethius, Dante, Words- 
worth (the list must needs be personal, but every 



n8 Problems of the War 

one can make his own corresponding calendar of 
afflicted and triumphant saints), either lived under 
conditions of national and social decadence or 
political tyranny and corruption that made some 
kind of withdrawal from the great world a sheer 
necessity to them, or saw the brightest hopes that 
had risen upon the bases of their faith dashed to 
the ground in hopeless ruin, or suffered the ex- 
treme of personal misfortune or affliction, or met 
some combination of more than one of these 
' trials of faith.' 

Think of Jeremiah flung into his pit to rot or 
starve, weeping not for himself but for his country, 
and yet — most cruel trial of all — unable even to 
sympathize with his own people's last struggles 
for the salvage of their national existence. Think 
of Plato surrendering all his hopes of influencing 
the practical politics of his age, and in his own 
decadent Athens retiring into his garden to live 
in a e city not made with hands ' (as we well may 
put it), finding little but illusion in the things that 
are seen and reality only in ' things invisible.' 
Think of Jesus living under an extortionate and 
cruel government, familiar with such incidents as 
that of c the Galileans, whose blood Pilate had 
mingled with their sacrifices,' and finding no con- 
solation in the hopes either of vengeance or of 
power which sustained the hearts of his fiercer 
compatriots. Think of Plotinus, with the ruins 
of the shattered Roman world falling around him, 



Belief and Experience 119 

and his body cramped and paralysed by a re- 
lentless and neglected disease. Think of Boethius 
after his prosperous and honourable toil in draw- 
ing together the Gothic and Roman elements in 
the society around him, and in rescuing the ancient 
learning to serve as a basis for the new order, 
and so holding the ages and the nations together, 
finding himself suddenly fallen under baseless 
suspicion that itself spelt the failure of his life- 
work, flung into his prison to await a cruel death. 
Think of Dante breaking into prophetic rapture 
as he saw the dawn of a better day already glowing 
on the political horizon, as he saw the political 
Messiah already on his march to heal the wounds 
of Italy, and looked back upon the long tragedy 
of her sins and sufferings as a thing of the past, 
and then waking from his dream to find himself in 
the ' darksome forest ' of confusion and dismay 
in which the dead Henry had left her, and the 
living beasts of lust and pride and greed now held 
her fast. Think of Wordsworth, waking at one 
and the same moment to the existence of the social 
problem and to the glamour of an illusory solution 
of it, looking upon that listless and ' hunger-bitten 
girl ' and believing in his very heart that within a 
few months such sights would be banished for 
ever from the face of the earth, and then seeing 
not only his hopes baffled, but the very mission- 
aries and apostles whose purity and zeal was to 
have brought those hopes to fruition raging round 



120 Problems of the War 

with the fire of cruelty burning in their eyes, and 
their arms plunged into innocent blood. 

Were their * trials of faith ' lighter than ours ? 
Were the awful facts that make us reel to and fro 
and stagger like drunken men, that have severed 
all our moorings, and made us ask whether we 
were dreaming till August, 1914, or have lived in a 
nightmare ever since — were these awful facts un- 
known or unrealized by all these heroes of the 
faith ? Did they live in a fool's paradise ; and 
was their faith beautiful but false, because they 
were fortunate enough never to have been obliged 
to recognize that power and that reality of wicked- 
ness and evil which have burst upon us ? 

No, verily ! But their sense of beauty, good- 
ness, and truth was primary and direct. It was 
an experience, not a speculation based upon a tra- 
ditional creed, thrown into a traditional intellec- 
tual formula, defended by selected facts or fictions, 
and shielded by ignorance. It was primary and 
it was true. And therefore the more closely and 
terribly evil pressed upon them, the stronger was 
the resilience of the power of good within them. 
The more clearly did they see that however strong 
evil men may seem, evil itself is essentially destruc- 
tive and parasitic and weak, and good alone vital 
and constructive. And hence, with a passionate 
sense of the actuality of evil they boldly pro- 
claimed the supreme reality of good, and with its 
reality its essential and eternal victory. They knew 



Belief and Experience 121 

that the only ultimate defeat of good in any man's 
soul is that which comes when evil transmutes the 
good that is within him to its own foul likeness, 
when hate wakes not indignation but answering 
hate, when seeming strength is worshipped as an 
idol, and ' success ' is taken, without more, as 
commanding imitation, with no enquiry as to 
what it is in which the evil man has ' succeeded.' 
They knew that this inward faithlessness is the 
only real defeat of the individual and that the 
ultimate defeat of goodness itself is impossible. 
He who has felt the breath of the Holy Spirit 
knows that so far as he can surrender himself to 
its guidance he is on the victorious side even 
though he fall. 

The heroes of faith have ' believed,' in the in- 
tellectual sense, doctrines as wide asunder as the 
mind can grasp. Many of them under the stress 
of actual conflict have had to fling aside the beliefs 
that they once held to be their very life. Perhaps 
none of them has formulated any creed that can 
wholly satisfy us, and it can hardly be that any 
one of them has solved for us the problem of evil. 
But all those that I have taken as types, and 
countless others, have come into close and terrible 
contact with the fact of evil, and crying out of the 
very furnace they have quickened our sense of 
good because their contact with it was closer 
still, and they left us the record that in the 
midst of horrors they felt as only great souls can 



122 Problems of the War 

feel the immortal strength of goodness. In times 
of outward hopefulness it is they that have taught 
us to look inward for all that really matters, and 
in times of misery and shame it is they who teach 
us that no happenings in time can cancel or 
destroy the eternally Existent. 



A QUESTION THAT SHOULD NOT 
BE ASKED 



By L. P. Jacks, M.A., LL.D., D.D. 

THERE is a widespread feeling abroad, in 
these troubled times, that theologians should 
do something to vindicate the goodness of God. 
Many people have been writing in that sense to 
the religious press. One writer went the length 
of suggesting that a conference of theological ex- 
perts should take the war into consideration and 
instruct Christian people how to harmonize it with 
their ideals and with their beliefs. 

Few of us, I suppose, would wish the matter to 
be dealt with in this business-like way. Yet we 
can all understand the state of mind from which 
such demands originate. We feel that a general 
vindication of the goodness of God at the present 
moment would be a welcome relief. It seems to 
us a natural and a legitimate demand. 

I have no doubt that when the sons of Zebedee 
asked Jesus that they might sit beside him on 



124 Problems of the War 

either side in his glory, judging the tribes of 
Israel, they too regarded their demand as natural 
and legitimate. To us it seems an extravagant 
demand ; but it would not seem so to them. 
There was to be a kingdom and there were to be 
thrones. So they thought. Who so well fitted to 
sit on the thrones as themselves ? Yet they had 
to be reminded that the demand was unreason- 
able. And I am going to suggest that our demand 
for a vindication of the goodness of God at the 
present moment falls under the same ruling. May 
not this request of ours, natural and legitimate 
as it seems, belong to that class of questions to 
which the answer is ' Ye know not what ye ask.' 

Whence comes this question ? What element 
in our nature is it which makes us so anxious to 
have the war and its attendant evils reconciled 
with the goodness of God ? What part of us 
would welcome the proof that these things are in 
harmony with Eternal Justice and Love ? Has 
the demand a noble origin or the reverse ? Does 
it spring from the weakness of our nature or from 
its strength ? Is the motive of the question one 
that ought to be encouraged ? In a word, is the 
motive good ? 

If these inquiries were taken to the philosophers 
you know what they would say. They would say 
that our desire to have the war reconciled with 
the goodness of God is an instance of that general 
desire for unity, for harmony, which is so deeply 



A Question that should not be asked 125 

characteristic of the human mind. Our minds 
are so made that we cannot tolerate the presence 
of a contradiction in our scheme of thought. If 
we cherish our ideal of the world, and yet find in 
our experience something at variance with that 
ideal, we can never rest until the two things are 
shown to be ultimately in harmony. And that is 
just the position at the present moment. The 
war contradicts our ideal of a just and loving 
God. And the demand that the two shall be 
reconciled springs therefore from our desire for 
unity. 

This desire for unity is commonly regarded as 
what one may call a privileged desire. We know 
very well that the world is not arranged to satisfy 
all our desires. That we do not expect. On the 
contrary we are content that a large proportion 
of our desires should be ungratified. It is better 
that they should be. The desire to be at ease, 
for example, to have a life wholly free from pain, 
to be rid of all difficulties and drawbacks, to be 
baulked and thwarted in nothing — what do we 
say to people who express desires of this kind ? 
We say, c Ye know not what ye ask.' ' You are 
asking for something extravagant, unreasonable ; 
something you would regret if it were conceded.' 
We have heard the story of the soul which, waking 
up after death, found itself in a world where all 
its desires were instantly gratified. For some 
time this soul believed that it was in heaven. 



126 Problems of the War 

Shortly afterwards it realized that it was in hell. 
That is the character of many desires. They are 
mistaken and should not be encouraged. But 
this desire for unity, we think is different. This is 
legitimate. We have a right to demand that it 
shall be gratified. That particular sort of dis- 
comfort which comes from finding facts at vari- 
ance with ideals is one which it is no part of our 
duty to put up with, but rather our duty to get 
rid of. This desire at all events is privileged ! 

But is it really so ? Looking narrowly into 
my own heart, I find that the privilege of this 
desire is not self-evident. It resolves itself more 
and more into a wish to get rid of a certain dis- 
comfort. It blends with the love of ease. A 
world where everything was in manifest harmony 
with one's highest aspirations would be such an 
easy world to live in ! How pleasant it would be 
if all our doubts and difficulties were automatic- 
ally suppressed ! What a vast amount of painful 
strife would be spared me if that conference of 
theological experts were to do its work once and 
for all, providing me with a formula of reconcilia- 
tion, which I could adapt to every occasion, 
stretching it to cover the big evils, and contracting 
it to cover the little ones, so that my mind would 
be perfectly at ease no matter what happened, 
whether the ruin of a planet or the death of a fly ! 
What a comfort that would be ! How it would 
ease the burden of life ! 



A Question that should not be asked 127 

Is there not something in this to rouse our sus- 
picions — to make us suspect, I mean, that the 
desire to have every contradiction removed is not 
that essentially noble thing it is commonly repre- 
sented to be ? When you call it a desire for unity, 
it looks sufficiently respectable ; but go a little 
deeper and ask what it is in your nature which 
prompts the demand and you get a different im- 
pression. A taint seems to fall upon this desire. 
The more you examine it the more it seems to ally 
itself with cravings which you know you have no 
right to indulge, and which in general you would 
despise yourself for indulging. You do not ask 
that every form of discomfort shall be expunged 
from your life. And what is there after all in this 
particular form of discomfort which comes from 
seeing your ideals contradicted that you should 
consider yourself entitled to exemption from that ? 
Let us picture the kind of people we should be if 
the demand were gratified. Let us picture our- 
selves as we should be if these reconciliations had 
been finally effected — prepared to say of every 
monstrous evil as it came along * That is in perfect 
harmony with the goodness of God. That is just 
as it should be, for it forms an element in a perfect 
world and belongs together with Eternal Justice 
and Love. The war and the incidents of the war, 
Louvain, the Belgian refugees, the shellings and 
the bayonettings, the fights in the trenches, the 
scenes in the field hospitals, the blowing up of the 



128 Problems of the War 

battleships — all part and parcel of one beneficent 
scheme, all compatible in the long run with the 
moral ideal, all things that have to be in order that 
the world may at last proclaim itself as good ! ' 

Who can contemplate himself in such a frame 
of mind without self-contempt ? Surely that does 
not represent the best of which we are capable ! 
How infinitely better it would be to have our 
desire for unity perpetually baulked than to have 
it satisfied on these terms ! How demoralizing ! 
How mean, how feeble, how unworthy of the 
soldiers of Christ does such a conclusion seem when 
we candidly realize what it involves ! Verily we 
know not what we ask. 

Does it ever occur to us, in our desire to have 
these things reconciled with the goodness of God, 
that we are paying evil a most unmerited compli- 
ment. Is it not a subtle way of going over to the 
enemy's side ? I can imagine that nothing would 
be so pleasing to Mephistopheles as to hear himself 
proved to be part and parcel of a divine universe. 
That is just what he wants us to believe about him. 
Our believing it enables him to play his game. 
He is never so deadly, never so completely master 
of the situation as when people are reconciling 
him with the goodness of God. He loves to hear 
himself explained away. That is why he finds 
himself so much more at home in the modern 
world than he was in the world of our forefathers — 
as Goethe indicates. The modern world has given 



A Question that should not be asked 129 

him the opportunity he seeks — by allotting him 
a place in the moral order. Our forefathers paid 
him no such compliment. 

In times when religion played a more active 
part in the life of England than it does to-day, 
men took little pains to reconcile evil with the 
goodness of God. Their attitude towards evil 
was too serious and too practical to be cumbered 
with that controversy. The presence of evil, far 
from alarming their religion, as it does ours, was 
precisely the occasion which called their religion 
into being, and lifted it into strength and noble 
expression, both in deeds and in words. The 
more evil they found, the more religion they pro- 
duced to answer its challenge. The religion of 
our forefathers had many intellectual limitations, 
but these were more than made good by the 
capacity it showed to hold up its head in dark 
times. Were Cromwell alive to-day, or had we 
among us men of that spirit, the effect of the war 
on their religion would only be to make it shine 
forth like a pillar of fire. But we, like spoiled 
children, who expect the world to give them their 
own way, we who have never trained ourselves to 
face the fact that part of the world has gone 
wrong, delay the moment when we must brace 
ourselves for the issue, demanding first that the 
facts before us shall be reconciled with our notion 
of what is right ! Once more we know not what 
we ask. 



130 Problems of the War 

Would it not be better, more moral, more reli- 
gious, to put this demand behind us as savouring 
not of the things of God ? Might we not personify 
the evil forces of the war and address them in 
terms such as these, ' You challenge me to recon- 
cile you with the conception of a perfect world. 
I will do no such thing. I will treat you as 
irreconcilable with even a decent world. You 
have no place here. I will regard you not as 
something to be fitted into my scheme of thought, 
but as something to be cast out of it into everlast- 
ing burnings. To me you shall stand accursed, 
and accursed for ever. You shall be an object 
lesson in everything that ought not to be. When- 
ever I see you pointing in one direction I will go in 
the direction clean opposite. Your cruelties shall 
only make me more careful henceforth to be kind. 
Your hatred and abuse I will turn into a reason 
for making my own speech more friendly and my 
judgment of others more tolerant. At every point 
I will answer you with the opposite. Everything 
you outrage I will exalt ; everything you affirm 
I will deny — for all your works prove you founded 
on a lie. The more your doings seem to blot God 
from the universe, the more convinced am I that 
God exists to judge and punish you. Just because 
you are so hideous and so wicked you shall be 
— not reconciled with God — but scourged out of 
existence by the beautiful and the good.' 

There is only one way in which evil can be 



A Question that should not be asked 131 

reconciled with good ; that is by suppressing it, 
by conquering it, by expelling it from the world. 
No evil is reconciled with good so long as it exists ; 
nothing that we can say about evil, nothing that 
we can think about evil, will ever bring the recon- 
ciliation into being. What reconciles evil with 
good is not our intellect alone but our will which 
uses the intellect as its servant and its tool. Here 
we may behold our mistake. Our mistake is in 
looking for a theory which shall do the business, 
in trying to deal with evil by merely explaining 
its presence in the world, not perceiving that so 
long as evil is suffered to exist and to triumph no 
conceivable theory or explanation would make 
one whit of difference. Evil, you say, is partial 
good. Well, what if it is ? Are evils like drunk- 
enness, or cruelty, or lust, made less pernicious by 
calling them partial good ? Is not their power for 
mischief just the same under the new name as 
under the old ? Are we any nearer to unity, to 
reconciliation, than we were before ? Are not 
these * partial goods ' just as destructive to body 
and soul, just as big a blot on God's fair universe, 
as they would be if you called them by their old 
names, and frankly treated them as the enemies 
of God and man ? ' Partial goods ' indeed ! I 
don't like the phrase ! For does it not suggest 
that these vile things have a partial right to be in 
existence, and that up to a point we should make 
terms with them and let them be ? But surely 



132 Problems of the War 

the beginning of wisdom is to recognize that they 
have no right to existence at all, and that even in 
their mildest forms they are, so long as they exist, 
utterly irreconcilable with the perfect Holiness 
of God. Call them how you will, explain them 
how you will, whitewash them how you will, it 
makes no difference to the truth that your chief 
duty is to oppose them, to suppress them, to con- 
quer them, to wipe them out of existence. By so 
doing, and not otherwise, will you ever reconcile 
them with the moral order, with the goodness of 
God. ' The only good evil is a dead evil ' — one 
that you or somebody else has conquered and 
slain. The reconciliation of evil with good is the 
conquest of evil by good. No other reconciliation 
is possible, or even conceivable. 

Our mistake is that our intellects try to recon- 
cile evil with good before our wills have got to 
work — sometimes, I am afraid, as an excuse for 
not setting our wills to work at all. We must 
reverse that order. Instead of thinking that we 
have conquered evil when we have explained it, 
we must begin by conquering it and then base our 
explanation on the conquest. The reconciliation 
of evil with good must be written in deeds first of 
all ; only afterwards can it be written in words, 
and then only in words which spring out of the 
deeds. But there are always people in the world 
who want the reconciliation effected in advance 
of the performance. To those people only one 



A Question that should not be asked 133 

answer is possible — * Ye know not what ye ask.' 
It behoves us to consider these things with 
candid and fearless minds. There is a possibility 
that in our efforts to reconcile existing evils with 
our notions of good we may be playing the game 
of the evils in question, thereby only adding 
another evil and perhaps a greater one to those 
already in being. I do not see that religion has 
anything to gain from these reconciliations. It 
is certainly not religion that asks for them. In 
times of crisis religion always shows itself as an 
attitude of the will, and it is one of the good re- 
sults of a great trial such as we are now enduring, 
to reveal religion in precisely that character. 



IS OUR FAITH SHAKEN ? 
By W. Whitaker, B.A. 

PART of the unsettlement of faith that befalls 
us at a time of shocking calamity is sub- 
conscious. Our articulate beliefs may, for some 
time, seem to remain unaffected. The change 
will have gone deeper, and some of the bewilder- 
ment that falls upon men (or, by the grace of God, 
some of the new hope that may arise in strange 
hiding-places of the soul) will come from unper- 
ceived influences. 

It is often the unremarked accumulation of 
shocks to the feelings, the little unregarded re- 
adjustments of the moral sense, the gradual wear- 
ing action of loss and frustration, that make the 
difference. 

These scarcely recognized changes, no argu- 
ments and scarcely any human words can minister 
to — at the utmost only the rarest words of vision 
and insight and great poetry can do so. 

\ 

I 
\ 



Is our Faith Shaken ? 135 

With silence only as their benediction, 

God's angels come 
Where, in the shadow of a great affliction, 

The soul sits dumb. 

But when, afterwards, the cloud over our thoughts 
clears somewhat, there presents itself, inevitably, 
the summons to think things out, to face the 
Irrational with Reason, to proffer even to the 
needs that are above and beyond all Reason such 
lowly instrumental service as our Reason can in 
all humility render. 

1. Upon the very threshold of a * thinking 
consideration ' of the matter, we have to realize 
that what we are confronting is Evil. It is not 
something to be explained away, or lifted up into 
a harmonious and perfect scheme of things. It 
belongs to a disordered and frustrated scheme. 
Is the very fact that we have to admit that the 
evil is there — evil appalling and uncontrovertible 
— is this fact in itself a sufficient refutation of all 
religion ? If so, there is nothing more to be said. 
But the very opposite is the truth. There is 
Religion (in the form in which we know it) because 
there is evil. Religion is not a theory of a per- 
fect world, held by perfect philosophers. The 
most highly developed of the world's religions are 
the * religions of redemption.' They are the out- 
come of a sore and pressing need. If humanity 
raises a cry c to One that with us works,' it is a 
cry * from out of dust.' It is forever a voice de 



136 Problems of the War 

firofundis. There is a very true sense in which 
the awful ills and sorrows of life are the very 
material out of which Religion always builds. It 
has been wisely said, in a recent article upon the 
war in the Manchester Guardian, ' While this world 
leaves so much to be desired we may be tempted 
to ask in our hearts whether there be a God, but 
if it left nothing we should lose our interest in the 
answer. So far as war increases or reveals the 
burden of humanity, it merely gives new poig- 
nancy to the eternal and necessary problems in 
which religion consists.' The one all-inclusive 
problem to which religion addresses itself is the 
problem of Redemption. Is not part of the 
bewilderment that comes upon us, from time to 
time, in respect to religion, the result of our mis- 
taking the very subject-matter with which it 
deals ? How can we understand the thing aright 
if our initial approach to it is wrong ? If we begin 
by assuming that we are to address ourselves to 
inquiries about a First Cause, or the nature of 
Substance, how is it likely that we shall get the 
faintest perception of what Religion speaks about 
— that is, the unspeakable need of a world that 
is wrong for salvation and healing ? It may well 
be that the war will impress upon us, as we never 
felt it before, the incredible magnitude of the 
world's Evil. But when did our Religion cease 
to warn us of the ' exceeding sinfulness of sin ' ? 
Surely the chief result of the war for the deeper 



Is our Faith Shaken ? 137 

thought of men will be to increase the conviction 
that Wrong is wrong. And that conviction is 
the very seed-plot out of which Faith springs. 
The fierce consuming passion of Religion is that 
which burns in the breasts of men who have seen 
that there was a madness of death and wrong in 
the world, and reacting from it have flung back 
upon their deepest instincts with the cry ' Shall 
not the judge of all the earth do right ? ' It is 
when he beholds his people plunged into the 
depth of ruin, material and moral, the whole head 
sick and the whole heart faint, that Isaiah receives 
his ' vision.' It is among a people of unclean lips 
and horrible rebellion that he sees the Lord ' high 
and lifted up.' If we have been nursing the 
thoughtless delusion that we had a religion, or 
hoped one day to discover a religion, that would 
' show us that the world is wholly fair,' and make 
black white, we are now surely delivered from it ! 
Religion does not make black white. It can do 
nothing with black except seek its utter destruc- 
tion. Recognize that it is there, and that it is 
blackest black ; that is at least one step towards 
the truth, ' and has so far advanced thee to be 
wise . ' The next step will be taken when our ethical 
perception passes on into a religious affirmation — 
when the sense of the profound wrongness of the 
evil begets a passionate self-surrender to the 
Right, which is felt to be the self-subsisting Life 
for which all else exists — which Faith calls God. 



138 Problems of the War 

5 But may not this " human cry," the call for 
God "out of the depths," instead of bringing men 
to religion at its best, produce vagaries of faith 
and ally itself with all kinds of delusion ? ' It is 
only too true that the resort to faith in God 
assumes superstitious forms which may weaken 
and not strengthen the moral revolt against the 
evil. We cannot find it in our hearts to censure 
the pathetic pleas written up in Continental 
churches for the deliverance of this and that loved 
one — the cry of wounded hearts for some special 
providence to make an exception in their case out 
of the wreck of a whole world. But we can dis- 
cover here the dividing line between Superstition 
and Faith. The fight against the evil, inspired 
by a profound sense of the supremacy of God's 
utter faithfulness to the cause of Right, will regard 
a magical deliverance as dishonouring to our moral 
nature. Because the evil we are facing is a World- 
calamity, there is no easy way out of it — there is 
no way out of it except an alliance with God him- 
self. We want no nostrums that will tell us how 
lightly to heal the hurt of the daughter of Zion* 
The remedy must consist in the utter and abso- 
lute love of goodness, and action on its behalf — 
' rend your hearts and not your garments ' : not 
burnt offerings, but ' let judgment roll down as 
waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.' 
Our way of fighting the evil must be worthy of 
God himself ; nothing less than this will do. Only 



Is our Faith Shaken ? 139 

when we rise to the prophet's insight that Evil is 
in the last resort antagonism to God, do we truly 
take its measure. It is upon that level, in that 
setting, that we see the thing in its true propor- 
tions, and prepare to break its power. 

2. We may go a step further. Not only does 
Religion not depend on showing that evil does not 
exist, or on explaining it away ; it often seems to 
be solicitous to show us, rather, that the evil is 
greater than we thought it. From time immemo - 
rial the preachers and prophets have been ex- 
pected to be the censors of the nation's sins. Lot 
flying from Sodom, Jonah denouncing Nineveh, 
the Savonarolas of every age, the purer ideals of 
unconventional orders and sects which the rest 
of their world partly derided and partly perse- 
cuted yet secretly honoured and feared — these 
are the phenomena of universal history. Men, 
when they are disturbed in the midst of their sins, 
may complain that the strictures are too severe ; 
but they are never satisfied with a lax religion, 
and those least worthy in their own conduct will 
readily throw an accusation against carelessness 
in holy places and offices. And the voice of 
Religion has to be raised in no uncertain accents 
in the present situation of Europe. No word that 
it can say will have validity or even meaning unless 
it is based upon the strong perception that the 
cause of the European war is Sin. If we are to 
listen to some voices we shall believe that so huge 



140 Problems of the War 

a cataclysm can have happened without any very 
profound moral cause. An innumerable set of 
tendencies and forces of a quite natural order ; 
accidents of place and time ; unfortunate mistakes 
in the conduct of diplomacy ; miscalculations of 
military and naval experts ; the clash of national 
aspirations against one another in a world not 
large enough to give scope to all — in such things 
as these explanations will doubtless continue to 
be found for the breakdown of our civilization. 
Such explanations have a certain kind of truth, 
but they do not go far down. Human society, 
in spite of its complexity and always-altering as- 
pects and developments, rests upon certain large 
and simple purposes and desires. Governments 
and armies and navies, statecraft and treaties 
and laws, cities and trade, national movements — 
these are but the visible working of a soul that 
s eeks its will through them all. If that soul were 
pure, passionately good, bent upon righteousness, 
its working would not be in a contrary direction. 
Men do not gather figs of thistles. What kind of 
sophistication must fall upon an age's thought to 
make it oblivious of such matter-of-fact truths as 
this ! We have always known that such a thing 
as moral causation exists : that there are in- 
escapable laws binding together human actions 
and their consequences : that history is not a 
medley of unconnected episodes. The wrong- 
doing of nations is not on a different footing from 



Is our Faith Shaken ? 141 

that of individuals. No Decalogue, no Sermon on / 
the Mount, was ever uttered to tell men that they 
might safely do things collectively from which as 
individuals they were warned off by a fiery sword 
turning every way in the conscience. The Divine 
Right of the State to do wrong, and to escape 
punishment, however long after, for doing wrong, 
forms part of no sacred text. It is true that moral 
sequences which reach over large tracts of history, 
and act upon a great scale, must take much longer 
to work out than individual actions. But the 
oak-like growth of the moral sowing of the Euro- 
pean Powers through the centuries and decades, 
is only the sturdier for its slow consummation. 
There is a judgment of history. The notion that 
the rise and fall of the peoples of the earth are 
unrelated to the character of the soul of the 
peoples, is surely a construing of the plain facts 
that throws all sanity to the winds. 

Religion has always told us of these things. 
When, therefore, its most sure word of prophecy 
has come true, in what sense is it possible to say 
that the event disproves Faith ? There are many 
mysterious judgments of God, but this war is not 
one of them. It is one of the plain judgments. 
The world is suffering for its sin. Nations have 
not loved righteousness, or they have loved it too 
late ; or when they have for a period done un- 
righteousness, they have imagined that it could 
be easily put away by forgetfulness, and that the 



142 Problems of the War 

World-soul would forget. But that is not the 
way of nature, or of God. Let there be a world 
of men tacitly admitting, if not openly professing, 
that covetousness and greed, class standards and 
national selfishness, are at worst quite natural 
failings, and may even be a proper spur to am- 
bition and a help in the struggle for existence ; 
let industry and commerce be arranged on such 
a basis ; let it be conceived that at all costs the 
individual shall fight for his own hand and the 
nation for its own hand ; let there be no manifest 
and painful shame for the open vice and the secret 
shames, the thousand thousand wrongs and oppres- 
sions of the social system ; and let the whole 
structure be crowned by the frank worship, in all 
the nations, of Military Force, which by its per- 
sistent preparation for war must inevitably cause 
war sooner or later to spring forth — and then say 
what miracle would be prodigious enough to in- 
terfere with the working of the moral law that 
overtakes a society that has left God out of its 
reckoning. At any rate it would be a strange 
hardihood that could find in such a testimony to 
the everlasting roots of Social Good, a reason for 
doubting the foundations of Faith. 

3. An interesting comparison may be made, if 
instead of asking * Is our Religious Belief shaken ? ' 
we ask * Is our faith in Science shaken ? ' For 
to multitudes of minds in the last fifty years, there 
has arisen the great rival creed which places all 



Is our Faith Shaken ? 143 

its hope for the future happiness of our race in the 
increase of our knowledge of the physical world, 
and its useful applications. Any opposition be- 
tween Science and Religion is intrinsically absurd. 
But in so far as Science has been put forward as a 
substitute for Religion, as the presiding genius of 
our fortunes, the plain fact is that such hopes have 
now ended in irretrievable wreck. The old Babel 
story has been repeated. It has become obvious 
that whatever range of mastery man achieves over 
the powers of nature, the decisive factor in the 
matter is not the degree of scientific progress that 
has been made, but the state of human passions 
and purposes that wield the new-found knowledge. 
Science is clearly a good servant in the hands of a 
good master. But how if the master be unre- 
generate ! At last we see Science consummating 
the long splendid series of its gifts to human kind 
and laying its most marvellous exploits at the feet 
of Death and Destruction. There is opened up to 
our gaze an unending vista of inventions, con- 
trivances and researches, which will only make 
our strifes more deadly, till we can see the poet's 
fear come true, 'and the great iEon sink in blood.' 
At least one leading scientist has declared his 
judgment to be that scientific men would do well 
to keep certain newly-won secrets of nature to 
themselves until the world is better fitted to use 
them. What is this but the bankruptcy of the 
principle of ever-widening Science — that is, of 



144 Problems of the War 

Science so long as it is Godless — ' some wild Pallas 
from the brain ' ? It is not difficult to dream of 
another result of knowledge adding every year 
to the strength and progress of a lordly human 
race, building bountiful homes amid ever-growing 
plenty, with disease gradually vanishing, while 
man grows liker man and the Golden Year comes 
in. But the condition precedent for such tri- 
umphs of science is that a deeper science still must 
be understood — the Science of man's own self 
and the eternal foundations of his happiness. 
That is the Science of Salvation. And if he has 
neglected this science, and clutched at another, 
which turned to ashes in his grasp, is that a reason 
why his faith in the better thing should be shaken ? 
4. To many it will seem truer to say that the 
modern world has turned, not so much to Science 
as to the hope of Social Regeneration. We can 
never, indeed, be sufficiently thankful for the 
awakening of the Social Conscience in our time 
and the quickened sense of our collective respon- 
sibility for our brother's weal and woe. Has the 
Social Gospel failed men in the same sense that 
the trust in materialistic Science has failed them ? 
What is true is that all social schemes have broken 
down under the great stress, in so far as they have 
built merely upon selfish aims. The last thirty 
years has seen the growth of innumerable theories 
and proposals for the reconstruction, in every con- 
ceivable way, of human society, and their appear 



Is our Faith Shaken ? 145 

ance is one of the noblest proofs that generous 
thinking and feeling remain with us. It was too 
early to expect that the elemental convulsion of 
Europe, which has swept into its whirlpool nearly 
all the learning and culture of the whole world, 
could be resisted in its mad fury by so young a 
growth as this new social enthusiasm. When the 
devastation is all over, this new work must start 
afresh, and start better. Can there be any doubt 
as to the defect in its programme that remains to 
be made good ? It must make its account with 
religion. It must lay its foundations in the 
Unseen. There were not wanting voices before 
the war that warned men, that when the peril 
and the emergency drew nigh, all the skilfully 
woven arrangements and bonds would snap like 
straw unless a deathless faith could be discovered 
whose motive power was not of this world. This 
has happened. It is not said for recrimination. 
It is, rightly understood, the penitential con- 
fession of this age. For some time, perhaps, men 
will plunge deeper into despair, and we may have 
to see such mournful spectacles as that of the once 
powerful teacher Loisy flinging away all hope of 
a wider humanity and a holier Church, and con- 
tenting himself with the thin divisive religion of 
patriotism and nationalism. But the true lesson 
cannot for ever escape us. The war has, at least, 
shown how man can die for man. The old story 
of love even unto death has never been so over- 



146 Problems of the War 

poweringly exemplified. Whatever history has 
to say of the leaders of European polity, it will 
raise a deathless record to the self-sacrificing 
spirits who, in all the nations, gave themselves 
to a Supreme Cause. It will remain with those 
who come after them to give articulate expression 
to that one, universal undivided Cause. Is not 
their unspeakable legacy of heroism to us a cry 
for a holier brotherhood and a deeper Faith ? 



THE RESPONSIBILITY OF SURVIVING 
By Stanley A. Mellor, B.A., Ph.D. 

UPON those who, for whatever reason, sur- 
vive the term of this conflict between 
nations there will rest a heavy burden of obliga- 
tion and responsibility, and, rightly seen, the 
decision, whether enforced or voluntary, to accept 
life rather than risk death at this stage in history 
is a matter as soul-searching and profound, and 
fraught with as desperate a significance for the 
future, as any decision could be. 

We have heard the story of a Frenchman, a 
man of heart and intelligence, who, when asked 
what he was doing for his country, replied ' I am 
surviving.' It was no light answer, but one that 
went to the very depths, soul-compelling and 
soul-challenging. Surviving! Why should any- 
one survive ? What is the value and the respon- 
sibility of continuing to live ? What is to be the 
significance of going on, into that world of peace 
after war, having been saved, perhaps, from suffer- 



148 Problems of the War 

ing and pain and loss now by the dying of others 
and the tragic sacrifice of youth ? 

The problem of continuing to live is, alas, not 
solved for anyone by the suffering and death of 
another ; nor is the healing of nations effected 
simply by the choice of patriotic and courageous, 
if you will sacrificial, death on the part of many. 
There is no such thing as vicarious sacrifice in 
that sense. The Cross is only the sign of our 
salvation in so far as we loyally accept its ob- 
ligations and responsibilities. Men have died 
heroically in this war for love of country, for 
love of freedom, for love even of peace : they 
have died for love of the ideal. But do we 
suppose that their death, which indeed solved 
the problem of living, solved it paradoxically 
and tragically enough, for them, can or does by 
itself solve the problem of living for those of us 
who survive ? To suppose that is to mistake the 
whole situation. Their death is the sign and the 
beginning of our responsibility, not in itself the 
discharge of that responsibility. If they died for 
the ideal, if inspired by love of the ideal they gave 
themselves gladly to death, then we, who survive, 
can only face the responsibility of surviving by a 
new determination to live for the ideal for which 
they died, and to give ourselves wholly and abso- 
lutely to life under the self-same inspiration that 
took them gladly to death. Is it for our own 
selfish ease and comfort that we are surviving ? 



The Responsibility of Surviving 149 

Is it that we may pursue, individually and so- 
cially, that old kind of existence, which we 
accepted all too thoughtlessly before this ruin 
broke on us and our world ? Is it that we 
may return to an individual life motived only 
by pursuit of worldly things, or to a social 
life unvisited by the flash of freedom and high 
spiritual adventure, or to an industrial and busi- 
ness life tolerating as normal and right the poverty 
and misery of many as means to the development 
of the few ? Is it for these ends, or anything like 
these, that we are surviving ? God forbid ! For 
if, beyond the limits of the war, the people of 
Europe do but return to a peace like the peace on 
which war broke, what have we gained, what has 
anyone gained, what will all the sacrifice of blood 
and life have been save only a ghastly and un- 
forgivable crime ? Men have been dying for the 
sake of a more just, more equitable, fairer, more 
godlike ordering of human society, in which the 
domination of Right, in every aspect of life, shall 
replace the domination of Might, and where free- 
dom to live well and faith to live worthily shall be 
confessed as alone satisfying objects of human en- 
deavour. Their dying for these things is not enough . 
Men and women who survive must live for these 
things, or the death that is accomplished fails of its 
object, and becomes an additional guilt. In this lies 
the responsibility of surviving. We must ask our- 
selves why, and for what ? Why should we live on ? 



150 Problems of the War 

If we are to accept this responsibility of sur- 
viving as it should be accepted, then we ought 
surely to begin now to look toward the future, 
plan for it, work for it, live for it. We ought to 
face certain profound facts in our life as it is now 
and as it must be in the future, and we ought to 
begin preparation of the gospel, the message, the 
mission, and the life, by which, if at all, we and 
the world are to be saved, made whole, in days to 
come. Even if no one else faces this task, at any 
rate Christian men and women must face it, or 
perchance the spirit may descend on the world 
and find sleeping those who, above all others, 
ought to be awake and watching. 

We are standing at the parting of the ways. 
We see, or we ought to see, to what a pass mankind 
has been brought by the principle of living on 
which they have, consciously or unconsciously, 
been acting for generations past. The old order 
of existence, with its materialism, against which 
men like Tolstoi, and Carlyle, and Morris, and 
others, strove mightily but in vain, with its domi- 
nating lust for power and wealth and its con- 
sequent enslavement of the masses of humanity, 
with its inequality and injustice, its competition 
and cruelty, its rivalries and jealousies and denials 
of fellowship, that old order has ended where it had 
to end, and compelled the world to reap in suffer- 
ing, tears, and agony, the harvest of generations 
of selfish, slavish, thoughtless, unideal existence. 



The Responsibility of Surviving 151 

Whatever else the war may betoken, seen in its 
wider issues and relations, it betokens assuredly 
a failure, awful and complete, in the mode of living 
that preceded it. The responsibility for this 
failure lies and must lie on us all, in that we sup- 
ported, or justified, or accepted without protest, 
a system of living which denied spiritual freedom 
and individuality at its base, and was throughout 
hostile to any vivid, moving faith in the values of 
eternity. 

To-day we are faced with this demand, stern 
and terrible. What atonement are we preparing 
to offer, what new ideals are we making ready to 
pursue and establish, in the future, so that the 
failures of the past be not repeated again and 
again ! Are we, in face of the lessons now being 
enacted for our guidance, merely drifting, quite 
absorbed in the tragic present, without realiza- 
tion of our responsibility to the future, without 
effort to purify our souls, build new ideals, or 
rebuild forgotten ones, clarify our thoughts con- 
cerning the kind of life men ought to live, and the 
labour that awaits us in helping them and our- 
selves to live it ? Are we simply moving blindly 
on towards some re-assertion of the old principles 
and ideals, if we dare call them such, to a base 
return upon our world of all the selfish narrow- 
ness and poverty of aim which has already brought 
us so much woe ? Or are we determining in our 
hearts, and preparing the needful consecration in 



152 Problems of the War 

our personal lives, to build a new and better 
future upon the ruins of the past, and do we realize 
just how much such an endeavour must mean in 
the way of new attitudes of mind, new points of 
view, new sacrifices, and new loyalties ? Con- 
templation of the heroisms of war, of the sacrifices 
made, and the loyalties displayed, is not an ade- 
quate preparation for the new courage, loyalty, 
and sacrifice that will be needed in peace. 

It is unfortunate that so many of us should 
apparently think that, with these high matters of 
the future welfare of our world and the realization 
of human destiny, we, in our so ordinary, humble, 
insignificant lives, have and can have no concern : 
we think that there cannot be any importance or 
any significance in the judgments passed, the 
attitudes adopted, the choices made by individuals 
so unimportant as ourselves. It is a great mis- 
take : in every thought we, as individuals, sin- 
cerely cherish, in every ideal we sincerely con- 
struct and attempt to follow for ourselves, in 
every vision of the right and every criticism of 
the wrong that comes to us, there is importance 
and significance, for all we know world-shattering 
and world-building. We ought never for a mo- 
ment to suppose that our personal ideals, our 
seemingly private thoughts and aims, have no 
bearing on the world's future and the destiny of 
humanity. On the contrary, if anything is cer- 
tain, this is certain that, by the thoughts which 



The Responsibility of Surviving 153 

humblest individuals think, by the deeds they do, 
Humanity is brought nearer to the ideal or kept 
away. Are we selfish in our individual life ? If 
so, indubitably, the measure of selfishness in the 
world is thereby so much the greater, and thereby 
is the road made longer which mankind must 
traverse to the fellowship of love. Do we, in our 
apparently private lives, pursue the aims only of 
a base materialism, thinking, in our business, 
simply of gain and profit, neglecting generosity 
and sympathy and the tolerance of loving justice ? 
If so, indubitably, we are helping to keep man- 
kind bound to the slavery of inequality and in- 
justice, and we are hampering the coming of the 
Kingdom. By our personal attitudes, at this 
moment, we can make and are making the develop- 
ment of international goodwill and friendship 
harder or easier in the future. It is folly to sup- 
pose otherwise than this, and it is a kind of 
cowardice not to believe, or to deny, that the 
quality and character of our immediate personal 
lives affect the wider life of the world. The fact 
is that ideals have their home in the individual 
human spirit and nowhere else, and the very 
central place of the destiny of Humanity is the 
individual heart. Within each one of us, at every 
moment, lie hidden the power and splendour, and 
also the failure or the shame, which may mark the 
destiny of the world in days to come, and the 
choice is ours. 



154 Problems of the War 

Some there are amongst us who believe, despite 
all monstrous evidence to the contrary, that this 
world is somehow a God's world, fraught with 
divine and eternal significance for ourselves and 
all mankind : we believe, despite all folly and 
weakness and sin, that Humanity is the greatest 
and most godlike of all created things, and that 
the destiny of Humanity is immeasurably glorious: 
we believe in splendours of beauty, truth, and 
good, to be realized by the individual soul, and to 
be made actual in some fellowship of all souls. 
Are we not committed utterly to the practical, 
personal service of these beliefs ? We cannot all 
die for them, it seems ; but we can all live for 
them, which may even be a harder task. Un- 
swerving loyalty and obedience to these beliefs, 
the carrying out into practice of what they demand 
individually and collectively, constitutes no small 
part of the desperate responsibility of surviving. 

In the situation of our world at the moment 
there is no guarantee that these supreme beliefs 
will be secured for the control of practical life, 
whatever the actual issue of the combat of force 
may be. No one can look out over the wildness 
of storm and distress and not discern signs of 
gravest menace to life's eternal and hidden values. 
It is altogether dubious whether there is any- 
where any genuinely clear realization as to whither 
the storm is hurrying humanity : it is doubtful 
whether there is much looking to the future at all ; 



The Responsibility of Surviving 155 

there is no certainty that those forces making for 
better life which, in all modern societies, seemed 
to promise much before the evil thing descended, 
and especially those forces born of the masses and 
the deeper life of democracy, there is no certainty 
that these forces are maintaining or will maintain 
themselves, even in those nations which profess- 
edly are engaged in the defence of them, or of 
some of them ; on the other hand it is only too 
clear that in many directions the possibilities of 
wider extension of freedom, personal and social, 
are seriously threatened, whilst the faith, in 
humanity, in spiritual values, and spiritual fellow- 
ships, on which alone genuine democratic, and 
for that matter Christian, ideals can be nourished 
is in many places held of no practical value and 
in some already frankly discarded. 

But, if the external circumstances of the 
moment provide so relatively little in the way 
of encouragement and hope, that fact does but 
increase the responsibility of those individuals 
who do believe, and over whom the fate of sur- 
viving hangs, to cherish and foster their ultimate 
ideals with more abundant and ardent loyalty, to 
learn again more completely the power of the in- 
ward life of faith, and to supply from the fires of 
personal devotion, steadfast waiting upon God, 
and consecration to ideals, whatever of hope and 
enduring encouragement is lacking in the circum- 
stances outside. Love of liberty, belief in democ- 



156 Problems of the War 

racy, faith in fellowship and freedom, belief in 
the value of the individual soul, these things are 
only firm based when, resting not on institutions 
or externalisms, but on the inwardly persuaded 
and converted heart, and drawing their ardour 
thence, they are able not simply to withstand the 
storm and darkness of the outer world, but to 
shine with redoubled splendour in the gloom. 
The really great and significant conflicts of our 
humanity will remain essentially the same, when 
this strife of nations is over — those conflicts, we 
mean, which are to achieve God and set men free 
— and the principles by which alone these vital 
conflicts can be endured and in the end solved to 
the glory of goodness are eternal and immutable, 
such as we can learn and foster in our hearts now 
just as easily as at any other time. Is it not the 
sacred duty of those who are to survive to be busy 
even now with the cultivation of those spiritual 
qualities and powers, and the education of those 
spiritual faculties, which alone in the end can 
secure and maintain any lasting victory for the 
best and noblest things ? The sacrificial death 
must be followed by the reconsecrated and puri- 
fied life, or its meaning fails, and, for every man 
who dies, some seed of love, and virtuous living, 
and determination to pursue a holier way, should 
somewhere in a human heart be sown, and there 
loyally brought to blossom, if surviving is to be 
worth while. 



The Responsibility of Surviving 157 

All the nations of Europe are pledging their 
whole future for years to come, placing posterity 
in pawn, calling up the credit, intellectual, moral 
and economic, of the days yet to be, and, at the 
same time, the situation being what it is, they are 
expending the powers, and particularly the powers 
of youthful life and energy, on which, in normal 
times, the immediate future so largely depends. 
One cannot but wonder whether, and to what 
extent, those who are destined to survive are even 
now making themselves ready to redeem the 
pledges on the future thus being made, and to see 
to it that the credit on which the nations are rely- 
ing shall not prove false and worthless. Day after 
day, it seems, so many of us occupy ourselves 
to morbid weariness with the immediate present. 
How vastly better it would be if, each day, we 
compelled ourselves to give some period of quiet 
reflection and prayerful thought to finding out 
how we personally stand to this responsibility of 
surviving, discovering what ideal we have as to 
our duties and obligations in this regard. Are we 
even now preparing ourselves for the time, five, 
ten, twenty years hence, when we shall be called 
upon to do our share in the labour of rebuilding 
the shattered fabric of social and national life, 
and finding a better way for mankind to follow ? 
Have we any clear ideas as to what we shall do 
and ought to do then ? Do we know what we 
actually desire in the way of individual and social 



158 Problems of the War 

life, and are our desires consonant with the best 
ideals : have we any guiding principles on which 
to rely : have we made the necessary personal 
choices for ourselves : have we any vision to save 
us : or are we merely going to drift, in the future 
as so often in the past, with the unthinking crowd ? 
These vital questions should become personal to 
each of us : we must see these problems as our 
personal problems, demanding our personal settle- 
ment, our personal choice of alternatives. For 
each man and woman the question is presented, 
how am I — not how are we, or how is society 
going to do this or that — but, simply, how am I, 
John Smith or whatever my name is, going to face 
the responsibility of surviving and undertake the 
burden of living into the future ? 

We ought not to forget that the conflict for 
God's kingdom, that warfare in which there is no 
release, will remain beyond the period of this 
strife, and by this strife will not be settled. The 
struggle for personal and individual freedom, for 
liberty to achieve and enjoy the best that is in us 
and in the world, will still be essentially the same ; 
the effort after personal righteousness and simple 
goodness of life and character does not in its 
ultimate significance alter with changing govern- 
ments and fluctuating states : the wider social 
problems, the conflict of classes, the inequalities 
between rich and poor, the need for nobler educa- 
tion and a more beautiful life for all, the struggle 



The Responsibility of Surviving 159 

against caste and privilege, the moral warfare 
against deadening custom and conventionality 
and unidealistic valuations of life, the whole vast 
endeavour to apply the Christian rule and way, 
all these will appear again fundamentally the 
same, only, in all probability, intensified, made 
more difficult. The vision of the ideal which 
to-day we cultivate will serve in that hour also, 
and the will to highest good which now we cherish 
and make serviceable will avail in the future. 

If, then, we are to discharge the responsibility 
of surviving, we must begin even now to look for- 
ward to the hopes and tasks of the future. We 
cannot and dare not let ourselves sink into morbid 
preoccupation with what has been or with what 
is. Other men, we are told many times, are dying 
for us. That statement, in itself a terrible one, 
may cover a deep truth ; but it may also, alas, 
cloak only a selfish sentimentality on the part of 
those who make it. That others should face pain 
and death for us is merit to them, and salvation, 
but by itself is no merit to us who survive, nor by 
itself any solution of our burden of living. Their 
death may be atoned for if Humanity emerges 
from this darkness with a stronger determination 
to build the City of God on earth ; but their dying 
does not by itself create the Heavenly City : that 
is our task, the task of those who survive, and the 
City is still to build. 

The line along which the task of surviving will 



160 Problems of the War 

alone be satisfactorily accomplished is surely quite 
clear, in its main direction at any rate. Everyone 
of intelligence, contemplating the world situation, 
feels that the root cause of failure is evident. As 
it has been said by many, man has mastered, only 
too well, so well as to have become its slave, the 
world of nature and material things ; but he has 
not understood or mastered his own inward spirit 
and the concerns of his soul. { Man in becoming 
master over nature has neglected the greater task 
of becoming master of himself and his highest con- 
cerns. In the rediscovery of the supreme im- 
portance of these, lies the next stage of his develop- 
ment. The war has put a period to his attempt 
to raise himself by the forces of nature : it reveals 
the need to raise himself by the forces of spiritual 
life.' 1 Therein is indicated the direction of the 
way to be followed : rightly understood it is 
adequate to guiding and controlling every in- 
tellectual and practical activity we undertake, and 
sets the rule for our study, our reflection, our social 
effort, and above all for the inward preparation 
of our souls. The only excuse that anyone can 
rightly have for continuing to live is that he or she 
may further the work of the Spirit in the world. 

The choice of life at this moment in history is 
as serious as the choice of death, and the summons 
of the hour is as tremendous for those who are to 

i Anonymous article on ' The Apocalypse of War.' — Hibbert 
Journal, vol. xiv., No. 3, April, 19 16. 



The Responsibility of Surviving 161 

survive as for those who solve the burden of living 
by choosing pain and death. Again we urge that 
the responsibility of surviving must be seen as a 
desperately personal one, demanding extremest 
consecration of soul and devotion of inward spirit. 
We should turn sometimes, nay often, from the 
stage of external events, the clash of arms, the 
sinking of ships, the deaths of men, to the stage 
of our own inward life, there to behold what is 
being enacted, there to discover what decisions 
are being reached, what ideals raised aloft, what 
preparation is being made for the future that 
awaits us, learning that the only way towards 
blessed life for all — which is what we should seek 
— lies in self -purification, self-consecration to the 
vision, devotion, and inward personal sincerity 
here and now. No day should pass without rind- 
ing us, who are to live on, waiting in prayer upon 
the Source of Spiritual Life that we may learn the 
way whereby the forces of his will are to enter 
and control our world. Let us remember that, 
if we live, it can be for no other reason than to 
build God's City in our hearts and in the world. 

After the Cross came the Resurrection, and men 
say that from this visitation of death upon our 
world there must be born a happier day and 
happier world for humanity ; it cannot be unless 
we who live on do of ourselves create that happier 
day and build that holier world. That is the 
responsibility of surviving. It is heavy enough 



162 Problems of the War 

and great enough to bring anyone who truly faces 
it to penitence and prayer ; and the whole future 
depends on how we, individually and collectively, 
do as a fact face it. How can we square the 
balance of death now written to our human 
account save by the consecrated and holy life ? 
We who live on must live that life and no other, 
or the balance remains unadjusted, and the sacri- 
fice turns to vanity and shame. 



THE MORAL EQUIVALENT OF WAR 
S. H. Mellone, M.A., D.Sc. 

THE extent of the contrast between the way 
in which individuals are able to settle 
their disputes, and the way in which nations on 
certain occasions settle theirs, is due at bottom to 
the fact that a government of individuals is pro- 
vided in this world, but not a government of 
nations. ' The aim of the nation in going to war 
is exactly the same as that of the individual in 
entering a court ; it wants its rights, or what it 
alleges to be its rights.' 1 And there is a significant 
resemblance in the nature of the ultimate appeal 
in the two cases. In the ways of civil life, and 
especially in the procedure of the law courts, there 
is held in reserve ' the same identical force as that 
which exerts and demonstrates itself in war.' The 
power to enforce its verdict renders the judgment 
of the court decisive. The force is not exerted, 
because it is not challenged ; everyone knows that 

1 Compare Mozley on ' War,' University Sermons, London, 
1906, pp. 102-3 (a- remarkable discourse preached before the 
University of Oxford in March, 1871). 



164 Problems of the War 

it is there, held in reserve, and that it would be 
overwhelming. 

When we see that the maintenance of civilized 
social order rests in part on force, we see what the 
' progress of civilization ' means. It means that 
in an increasing variety of ways the appeal to force 
is displaced by other appeals — by the appeal to 
reason and conscience, to the demands of justice, 
to the feeling of a common humanity — in a word, 
by those humane appeals to which mankind has 
learnt through ages of increasing culture to re- 
spond ; or, if the appeal to force must be held in 
reserve, that it shall be kept in the background, 
out of sight and out of mind, and that the occa- 
sions for its coming forward shall be the fewest 
possible. The increase of civilization means the 
increase of the free welfare that springs from com- 
mon loyalty without constraint. 

In war, on the contrary, the appeal to naked 
material force is the centre and purpose of all pur- 
poses. The disputes of nation with nation are 
settled substantially as all disputes were settled 
in the days of the cave-man. ' With all the elab- 
oration that science and experience have added 
to the methods of war, it is still in principle what 
it was ; men put away what had become like a 
second nature in their normal ways, and they go 
back to the primitive and undisguised appeal to 
force.' The difference is, that all the power of 
invention and discovery, of wealth, of foresight 



The Moral Equivalent of War 165 

and organization, is directed to increase the power 
to destroy. 

It is idle to dwell specially on any alleged ' fail- 
ure of Christianity ' to account for this state of 
things. The ' failure,' whatever its extent may 
be, attaches equally to Christianity, to civiliza- 
tion, and indeed to morality itself. But it is 
needful to remember that in these things, ' failed ' 
means 'not succeeded yet.' It is because men 
and nations are imperfectly Christianized, im- 
perfectly civilized, imperfectly moralized, that 
such calamities as this world- war fall upon us. 
Shall we conclude that therefore Christianity, 
civilization, morality, are illusions ? 

What we have said of war undeniably points to 
a fundamental fact. But there are other and 
different facts involved in it ; and to these I would 
invite the reader's earnest consideration. It is 
undeniable that the prosecution of war, and above 
all of this war, makes on the nation individually 
and collectively certain great demands which are 
moral demands. The provision even of the 
strictly material necessities of the struggle, even 
of the munitions and the money, requires of the 
nation individually and collectively capacities 
which are profoundly moral in their nature and 
which are of vast significance for its future. 

Not only on its material side, but in the realm 
of mental and spiritual things, modern civilization 
has suffered a shock whose overwhelming force 



166 Problems of the War 

has shaken to the bottom its characteristic beliefs 
and expectations. These beliefs and hopes had 
been too lightly won. We had not bought them 
for a great price. I speak of Western Christen- 
dom at large, and of ourselves as a nation. The 
spiritual treasures which we thought we had won 
have vanished in the dark, and we are left empty- 
handed and bewildered. We had not really won 
them. We had no right to hold them on such 
terms. 

Our ideals of peace were such as to make it 
possible for pacificism to be a profession. We 
extolled that so-called peace whose ample scope 
covered all the social diseases and shameful abuses 
of civilization ; and now, in the agony of war, we 
are learning the full horror of many things which 
were commonplaces in peace. We know now 
something of what it means to the nation that the 
most unholy trinity of mammon, strong drink, 
and lust should grind away the lives of unnum- 
bered helpless children. We made progress a 
watchword, though all history cries out against 
the notion of a gradual upward and onward move- 
ment of man. History tells of victories that were 
defeats, of defeats that were victories. The Cross 
on Calvary, the death-agony of the secular power 
of Rome, the fierce life begotten by the young 
northern nations over the ruins of the ancient 
world, the resurrection from the grave of the spirit 
of that old world with power to mould in count- 



The Moral Equivalent of War 167 

less ways the mind and heart of the new — these 
things are not exceptional but typical of the stuff 
of which progress is made. We made an idol of 
science ; but now, many know what a few knew 
before — that science can do nothing but fulfil pur- 
poses set by human wills, purposes which she 
cannot create or approve or condemn. Science 
proves herself the obedient and efficient servant 
of the will to destroy, as she is of the will to saved 
In religion, we had rejoiced at the departure of 
the ' age of dogma.' We supposed that a few 
broad and simple principles, the ' religion of all 
sensible men,' would suffice. We had lost the 
God of the old covenant, the God of the fire, of 
the cloud, and of the thick darkness ; and the 
God of the Cross of Calvary we had not found. 
Knowing that we must labour even for daily 
bread, we thought that faith in God would be 
cheap ! 

Shadow by shadow, stripped for fight, 
The lean black cruisers search the sea ; 

Nightly their level shafts of light 
Revolve, and find no enemy ; 

Only they know each leaping wave 

May hide the lightning and their grave. 

And in the land they guard so well 

Is there no silent watch to keep ? 
An age is dying, and the bell 

Rings midnight on a vaster deep ; 
But over all its waves once more 
The search-lights move from shore to shore. 



1 68 Problems of the War 

And captains that we thought were dead, 
And dreamers that we thought were dumb, 

And voices that we thought were fled 
Arise, and call us . . . 

We have needed the stress and strain of the 
greatest war known to history, to teach us what 
the messages of experience for generations might 
have told us, had we ears to hear : the value for 
•the nation, at all times, of those things which we 
know to be precious in war time. The individual 
devotion, the willingness to sacrifice much for 
the sake of working together in a great whole for 
a cause which demands strenuous labour ; the 
sinking of class-consciousness, sect-consciousness, 
party-consciousness, for the common good — all 
these, and more, we have given, as we never gave 
before, for we heard the ideals of patriotism and 
national service beginning to speak with an alto- 
gether new significance, uttering the penetrating, 
tragically challenging note of appeal, ringing out 
like the call of Victor Hugo's alpine eagle, ' qui 
parle au precipice et que le gouffre entend.' 

Shall we sink back into the old ways, when the 
stress of war is ended ? Is Patriotism to go on 
meaning nothing but preparation for war ? Is 
national service to go on meaning nothing but 
training for the distinctive purposes of military 
work ? ' Besouled with earnest nobleness, did 
not slaughter, violence, and fire-eyed fury grow 
into a chivalry ; into a blessed loyalty of governor 



The Moral Equivalent of War 169 

and governed ? And in work, which is of itself 
noble and the only true fighting, shall there be 
no such possibility ? . * ,. The chivalry fighters 
wished to gain victory, never doubt it, but 
victory, unless gained in a certain spirit, was 
no victory ; . . . had they counted the scalps 
alone, they had continued Choctaws, and no 
chivalry or lasting victory had been. And in in- 
dustrial fighters and captains shall no nobleness 
be discovered ? To them, alone of men, shall 
there for ever be no blessedness but in swollen 
coffers ? To see order, gratitude, loyal human 
hearts about them, shall be of no moment ; to see 
deformity, mutiny, hatred and despair, with the 
addition of half-a-million guineas, shall be better ? 
... Is there no profit in diffusing heaven's 
blessedness, but only in gaining gold ? If so, I 
apprise the mill-owner and millionaire that he too 
must prepare for vanishing ; that neither is he 
born to be one of the sovereigns of this world ! u 

I am convinced that the country's deepest need 
is for the ideal of patriotism permanently to 
penetrate and control every part of the organized 
social activities of the nation, so that all good work 
of every kind shall be recognized and honoured 
as national service in the truest sense. 

Let us look at this a little more closely, both 
from the individual and personal and from the 
social point of view. What are the personal quali- 

1 Carlyle, Past and Present, book iv., ch. 3. 



170 Problems of the War 

ties promoted by war, and energetic and dangerous 
adventure of all kinds ? ' War and adventure,* 
says William James, ' keep-all who engage in them 
from treating themselves too tenderly. They 
demand such incredible efforts, depth beyond 
depth of exertion, both in degree and duration, 
that the whole scale of motivation alters. Dis- 
comfort and annoyance, hunger and wet, pain and 
cold, squalor and filth, cease to have any deterrent 
operation whatever. Death turns into a common- 
place matter, and its usual power to check our 
action vanishes. With the disappearance of these 
customary inhibitions, ranges of new energy are 
set free, and life seems cast upon a higher plane of 
power.' 1 This is why Nietzsche delighted in the 
glorification of the warlike virtues. Its truth to 
life may be granted. But, as James reminds us, 
there is much more to be said. What is all this 
undertaken for, in the case of war ? The imme- 
diate aim of the soldier's life is destruction, and 
nothing but destruction. Any constructive re- 
sults of war are remote and non-military. What 
we need is to realize in the realm of the personal 
life ' the moral equivalent of war ' — to find some- 
thing heroic that will appeal to men as univers- 
ally as war does, but which is not hostile to 
civilization in the ways in which war is. We 
need the heroic standards of life turned to an- 
other purpose — a purpose beyond the power of 

1 James, Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 365-7. 



The Moral Equivalent of War 171 

Nietzsche's fevered brain to conceive, uttered in 
the sublime words of ancient Hebrew prophecy : 
* A man shall be as a hiding-place from the wind, 
and a covert from the tempest ; as rivers of water 
in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a 
weary land.' The proud boast — as it once was — 
of knight-errantry and chivalry, ' noblesse oblige,' 
the truth that nobility is obligation, that for a 
man to serve his fellow men and work for their 
good is the highest heroism, that the more he tries 
to do this the stronger his own inner life will grow 
and the more of a hero he will come to be — this 
is the Christian principle of life in action. The 
daily life of every one of us teems with occasions 
that try the temper of our heroism as search- 
ingly, though not as terribly, as battle-field or 
fire or wreck. We are born into a state of war, 
with falsehood and disease and misery in a thou- 
sand forms all round us, and with the heroes of 
every age and race calling on us to take our stand 
like men in the eternal battle against these things. 
We need not speak of that personal warfare in 
which a man's own soul is the battle-field. Robert 
Browning makes his half-cynical but keen-sighted 
Bishop Blougram say : — 

When the fight begins within himself 

A man's worth something. God stoops o'er his head, 

Satan looks up beneath his feet, 

He's left, himself, in the middle . . . 

. . . the soul wakes 
And grows. Prolong that battle through his life. 



172 Problems of the War 

We have already dwelt on the fact that, for the 
first time in the experience of many, the national 
life has in the main become a genuine co-operation 
for a common object instead of a sectional strife 
between classes and conflicting interests. The 
significance of this fact lies in its manifestation on 
an unprecedented scale of those intellectual and 
moral qualities which make such co-operation 
possible. On the continuance and extension of 
these efforts — altogether apart from war — depends 
all real hope of a worthy future for our country* 
Such is, in social and national life, * the moral 
equivalent of war.' 

This is not the occasion to attempt to speak in 
detail of that stupendous task of social reconstruc- 
tion which must follow the close of the war. But 
the fact remains, that beyond all the special needs 
of army, navy, and munitions, the State under the 
pressure of inexorable necessity has assumed par- 
tial control of certain great organized utilities 
which under private enterprise had conspicuously 
failed to serve the common weal. Such measures 
were demanded for the very safety of the nation. 
No doctrinaire theories for or against ' collec- 
tivism ' can alter the significance of this fact. 
And in the light of the experience thus gained, 
the national organization of such services for the 
good of all becomes a matter of practical politics 
in the plainest meaning of the term. 

One practical issue faces us with an urgency 



The Moral Equivalent of War 173 

admitting of no delay : that of the welfare and 
preservation of child life — now seen to be in the 
fullest sense a national problem of the utmost 
urgency. The health and welfare of children con- 
stitute an essential condition of national stability 
and health, at all times, and most of all in a time 
of national stress such as this, when tens of thou- 
sands from the best manhood of the nation have 
laid down their lives — men skilled in trade and 
professions, trained in commerce and manufacture, 
men whose labours have contributed in their 
measure to the creation and maintenance and 
increase of our national prosperity. 

It must be confessed with shame that even in 
times of ' peace and prosperity ' a great part of 
the nation's children come into the world under 
circumstances which afford them no fair oppor- 
tunity of survival or of health. Of all the differ- 
ences between being even moderately wealthy 
and being poor, the most cruel is this : that while 
it has become exceptional for a child of well-to-do 
parents to die in infancy, the odds in favour of the 
survival of a child born in the poorest parts of a 
great English town are only slight. And the 
war has already begun to reduce towards the 
economic poverty-line the circumstances of many 
families hitherto more favourably situated . Public- 
spirited and far-seeing people in various parts of 
the country are now taking measures to meet these 
dangers. Such work is national service in the 



174 Problems of the War 

truest sense. In these endeavours the education 
service of the country can and must play a great 
part. Our system of compulsory education affords 
the community its only opportunity, on any ade- 
quate scale, of investigating and controlling the 
condition of the children of the economically 
* lower ' or unprivileged classes. 

In the English educational system as a whole 
it is estimated that there are more than seven 
millions of pupils of various ages and grades, most 
of them of tender age— an army comparable in 
numbers with the forces under arms in the Euro- 
pean conflict. These seven millions are the future 
England. And in protecting and helping them, 
we guard the lines of communication between the 
England of to-day and the England that is to be. 
It is here too that our greatest danger lies. The 
national solidarity which has transformed our 
outlook on the world, has not been able to prevent 
the emergence of those forces of reaction which 
find in war-time opportunities which they never 
fail to use. The very needs of the nation are ex- 
ploited in order to attack and reduce one by one 
those public services organized for the common 
good in this country, which have been wrought 
out by cautious efforts through the past hundred 
years. 

At the present time, I sincerely believe, we are 
engaged in a struggle in defence of the moral 
foundations of civilized life, which are in danger 



The Moral Equivalent of War 175 

through no fault of ours. Yet not even this cen- 
tral and supreme fact of the situation, as, I repeat, 
I believe it to be, nor the sense of honour that 
participation in such a struggle infuses into the 
heroism and self-sacrifice of our soldiers as a whole, 
not even these things must be allowed to blind 
our eyes to the spiritual dangers which such a con- 
flict, prolonged as it has been, involves for the 
nation. Poison from the sins of the vanquished 
works in subtle unseen ways into the soul of the 
victors ; and there are signs of a more embittered 
temper, and a narrower faith, which, if unheeded, 
will go far to undermine that which our men have 
gone forth to preserve. Let us ponder the inner 
meaning of these moving words written by an 
officer now at the front : ' I know that I am speak- 
ing not for myself alone, but for many in like case, 
when I say that our one haunting dread at this 
hour is lest those who are left behind, in their 
laudable anxiety to hearten and support us in our 
military endeavours, should forget the end in the 
means — lest, if we perish (which matters little) 
there should perish with us (which would matter 
infinitely) those visions and ideals of a saner and 
nobler national and international life for which 
we go out to fight.' 1 Let us see to it that when 
the conflict is over we shall not only reconstruct 
the material fabric of civilization, but also re- 
affirm its spiritual purpose. 

1 See The Nation, April 8th, 19 16. 



THE NATIONS ON THEIR TRIAL 
By H. Enfield Dowson, B.A. 

IN our national life and in our private life 
we are being weighed in the balance. It 
is a great world-inquest of the nations. We 
are standing at the judgment bar of history, 
on trial before God and man. We read of the 
great days of old, when nations passing through 
the furnace were tried yet so as by fire, the dross 
consumed, and only the pure gold survived to 
enrich the future of mankind. Yes, mankind 
were never so truly in the crucible as to-day. 
We are up against the mightiest military power 
the world ever saw, fighting at this hour for our 
very lives, but not only so, fighting also for the 
salvation of the human race from the domina- 
tion of the most tremendous military power 
that ever menaced it. Germany, of old our 
friend, her people of the same stock as our- 
selves, with whom we had never been at war 
since the world was, and with whom till the 






The Nations on their Trial 177 

most recent days, war was unthinkable, has 
come into death grips with us and we have had 
no choice but to unsheathe the sword. The 
old home of sweetness and light, divided into a 
number of small states, a spirit breathing in 
her very soul of the truest culture, the world's 
advanced guard in science, philosophy, theology, 
and literature, her Universities visited for gen- 
erations by our youth, her people living the 
simple life in a frugality unknown in England, 
had been transformed by the reign of blood 
and iron under Bismarck. The situation of a 
hundred years ago is recalled, and we, who then 
were the life and soul and the mainstay of 
the battle of Europe against the overweening 
ambition of Napoleon, holding the fort of 
European liberty against him, are now fighting 
a similar battle against a Germany obsessed 
by the same megalomania. She has no more 
conscience in the prosecution of her ambition 
than he had. Like him, she seeks the domina- 
tion of the world, like him she shrinks from 
nothing to achieve it, like him the ruthless de- 
vastator of Europe, like him knowing no laws, 
human or Divine, only obeying her own im- 
perial will and, like a car of Juggernaut, crush- 
ing in her progress all that lie in her path, 
small nations her helpless victims, and no nation 
able to trust to anything but its own right 
arm to save it from destruction, treaties only 



178 Problems of the War 

scraps of paper, torn to shreds. Absolutely 
against our will this awful war, for which we 
were entirely unprepared, has been thrust upon 
us, its overt occasion the infamous attack on 
Belgium that gave us no choice, its real neces- 
sity the defence of the civilized world against the 
new incarnation of Napoleonic ambition which 
assails it. 

But this dear old England of ours is our 
first concern. Don't let us ask then, only, as 
so many have been doing amongst us, ' What 
is wrong with Germany ? ' but also what may 
be wrong with ourselves. The charge is often 
brought against us by Germans of self-righteous 
hypocrisy. They seem to hear us saying, ' We 
are the people and righteousness will die with 
us.' Is there no vestige of truth in it ? Well, 
we must confess that we have been among the 
first of those who have gone out into the more 
or less unoccupied and untenanted portions of 
the world's estate, and without so much as 
saying { At your leave, or by your leave,' have 
pegged out claims and run up the Union Jack 
upon the most desirable sites, henceforth to 
become our special preserves. The only access 
to these being across the seas, we guard them 
by a navy which we have allowed no other to 
approach in size. Having thus possessed our- 
selves of all we want, we cry ' Pax.' In the 
meantime Germany, as the united Vaterland, 



The Nations on their Trial 179 

came into existence late in the day, only to 
find us more or less blocking her path. Now 
it is well for us to put ourselves in the place of 
other nations. A policy of mutual considera- 
tion, and even, on occasions, of self-sacrifice 
for the common welfare of mankind is the ideal 
for nations as for individuals. If we had shown 
a larger measure of this spirit in our past his- 
tory, maybe we should have avoided some of our 
wars. It is, at all events, a call to us to-day, 
under the stress of this awful cataclysm and 
the world-wide disasters it has brought on 
humanity, and on this nation with the rest, to 
reconsider our international relations, and look 
beyond our own immediate interests to the 
natural and legitimate needs and ambitions 
of our neighbours. To sacrifice in future our 
own aggrandizement for the peace and goodwill 
of the world, and for the brotherhood of nations 
living in amity, is a call that comes to us from 
the lessons of this awful war, and not only 
from the bitterness that it has engendered but 
from the antagonisms that have engendered 
it. To win back blessed peace in the hearts of 
the peoples of the earth is worth many national 
sacrifices. The common interests of all the 
nations should be the guiding star of inter- 
national politics. 

This can alone keep the peace of the future, 
in a bond never to be broken by the repetition 



i So Problems of the War 

of such outbursts of a hell upon earth as we 
now behold, born of the reign of self-interest 
as each nation's only law. It is by each sub- 
ordinating selfish ambitions to the common 
weal that the greatest good for each will be 
won, the peoples grasping hands all round in 
a new kingdom of God among men. This may 
be a counsel of perfection ; but it is the spirit 
out of which alone, in God's good time, may 
arise one day the federation of mankind under 
the segis of an international court of justice 
policing the civilized world. That is my dream. 
In the meantime all has not been for the 
best in the best possible of worlds with us at 
home, or with any of the warring nations. 
After forty-five years of European peace indus- 
try has advanced by leaps and bounds in every 
land, and wealth has enormously increased. 
All the discoveries and inventions of modern 
scientific and technical knowledge have changed 
life completely from the simplicity and frugality 
of earlier days. While one of the scandals of 
the age has been the vast gulf fixed between 
the extremes of wealth and poverty, with the 
growth of the wealth there have been com- 
bined a luxury and a love of pleasure and a 
spirit of easy-going self-indulgence that have 
infected and enfeebled the moral stamina of 
the age. The grit of their fathers has been lost 
by multitudes of the well-to-do. Influences have 



The Nations on their Trial 181 

been at work that have invaded and depressed 
the vigour of the whole community. Too many 
are mere idle and pampered passengers in the 
ship of state. The old spirit has been passing 
away born of hard and less luxurious times. As 
a part of this lowering of the moral stamina 
there has been seen a growing ' Materialism,' 
in lives content with the outside comforts that 
come so easily, a relaxation of high endeavour, 
an absence of the pursuit of things greater and 
better than a man's material welfare. Self 
has loomed large, high ideals for things out- 
side the narrow circle of personal interest have 
been lost. The age has been one of moral and 
spiritual lethargy and somnolence. Into it a 
bomb has burst. * Sleeper, awake ! ' has rung 
in its ear. The powers of darkness have broken 
through the crust of its content ; and a demon 
from the bottomless pit has blown it into the 
air. Christianity is dumbfounded. The con- 
ceit of civilization is killed in the Arma- 
geddon engulfing the world. Everything is 
in the melting pot. Humanity is under the 
harrow. It is a period of wrestling with the 
problem of evil in all our souls with an 
abasement of our pride in the twentieth cen- 
tury morals and twentieth century religion. 
What a thin veneer has concealed the demon- 
iacal spirit that lay beneath. It is in humility 
and shame that a prayer beyond the power of 



1 82 Problems of the War 

words springs from our hearts for the rising 
out of the abyss of a new spirit. Shall the souls 
of our Houses of Israel expire in this mighty 
cataclysm ? Shall the brotherhood of man 
perish in fire and sword ? we ask. Do we see 
any source of hope ? Yes ! thank God, for 
we see that the gigantic evil that menaces man- 
kind from this war-fiend has given birth to a 
corresponding resurgence of good. We see that 
the battle between God and the Devil has been 
joined. We see that the world has been aroused 
from selfish sleep to a mighty effort to exorcise 
the demon that possesses the soul of Germany, 
and to restore her once more to her better self 
as she passes through the waters of humiliation 
in store for her. It is indeed the very horror 
of the world-tragedy that inspires so many of 
mankind to leave everything they hold dear 
to overcome the incarnate devil that disregards 
human life and female honour, making man, 
woman, and child their prey from the air in 
their beds at night, in the bosom of the 
deep in the sinking ships, in the massacres 
of civilians wholesale at the taking of towns, 
in leaving prisoners to perish from typhus, in 
looking on while hundreds of thousands of Ar- 
menians are done to death and worse. It is 
all this accumulation of iniquities that has 
brought half the manhood of Europe into un- 
exampled unison, with a courage unto death 



The Nations on their Trial 183 

to rise in their might to stay the terrible foe 
of the human race in his mad career. It is 
a holy crusade in the cause of humanity that 
summons men to leave their homes, their live- 
lihood and all that they love, to lay down life 
and to suffer untold hardships. It has entered 
with its call to a living sacrifice almost all our 
own English homes, fathers, husbands, sons, 
and brothers answering it. It has been heard 
by mothers and wives and sisters sending their 
beloved to fulfil it with their benediction, from 
houses left desolate, these dear women's hearts 
bearing the hardest part of the burden with 
their anxiety and grief, God bless them. 

The millions of our own British soldiers have 
gone forth, a brave citizen army to give their 
lives to save their dear land from the fate of 
Belgium, and Serbia, and Poland, and Monte- 
negro, and Armenia. It is a new baptism 
of the spirit for our people. It is a proud 
thing for us who love them to see our own 
flesh and blood without a question enter 
what they call hell, in order to hurl back to 
the pit whence it came the demon they are 
fighting. They are bearing their cross in the 
cause of humanity, justice, and liberty, and the 
reign of righteousness throughout the world. 
They are raised to a higher level of self-devotion 
than they ever knew before in their lives. 
They have come from all classes impartially. 



184 Problems of the War 

Aristocracy, middle class, working class, have 
all sent their best and bravest, and they do 
not faint or fail. Nothing has struck me more 
than the spirit of our Sunday scholars at the 
front. They write such splendid letters ; and, 
when they come home on leave, they seem to 
have put on a new manhood and self-respect, 
taking whatever comes all in the day's work in 
simple unassuming manliness, with no trace 
of heroics. They are just ' doing their bit,' 
that is all. Here at home, before the war, they 
were quite ordinary lads, fond of their foot- 
ball and cricket, and given to amusements ; 
but the great occasion has made them twice the 
men they were, as they carry their lives in their 
hands in the great battle * for England, home, 
and duty*' It has re-made them. To live 
and maybe die for that, taking a man's part in 
this great world's battle for the national salva- 
tion, and for doing justice on inhuman crime, is 
an inspiring thing. How high the inspiration 
may rise is recorded in the heroic death of the 
brave soldier, bearing the plebeian name of 
* Smith,' when at a moment's notice he threw 
himself on the lighted grenade to save his 
fellows from his own self-inflicted fate. That 
is an object lesson of the way the call for the 
living sacrifice is being answered, and of human 
nature lifted up to heights undreamt of in the 
piping days of peace. 



The Nations on their Trial 185 

I have spoken with a sad heart of the diaboli- 
cal crimes of Germany in this hour. I loved the 
Vaterland in my happy boyhood in Heidelberg ; 
and we all owe more than we can tell to her 
inspiring influence as a great teacher in the 
highest realms of thought and life. She is 
only possessed with a passing madness, to be 
put to rest by the severe chastisement which 
will drive it home to her that such things as 
she is doing cannot be done with impunity. 
Germany drunk will reappear as Germany sober. 
Even now I see in her people, by the side of 
her barbaric outburst, the same living sacrifice, 
the same patriotic self-devotion, that we know 
here. The love of the Vaterland takes the 
German out of himself just as much as the 
native land so dear inspires the devotion to 
the death, of our British soldiers. The lift 
above self to the sacrifice of life to the nation is 
a noble passion, while those German mothers 
and wives bear their burden of anxiety and 
grief like ours at home. 

What about ourselves, however, staying in un- 
disturbed peace at our own firesides, protected 
by our brave defenders ? We must bear our 
part in an England quite different from the old 
one before the war. We shall never see again 
the old easy-going times. We shall be called 
upon for many an unwonted sacrifice. There 
will be no more for any of us the old luxurious 



186 Problems of the War 

lives. Much more hardness is in store for us 
who are well-to-do, and it will do us all good to 
share in some small degree the lot of our fellow 
countrymen to whom privations we have never 
known are a part of every day's experience. We 
are going to be taxed much more heavily, the 
heavier the better. It is the fairest and most 
drastic way of making every one of us save 
and put our savings into the common treasury 
of the national resources, in due ratio to our 
means, none escaping our share of the burden. 
We shall be braced up to thrift as a new habit 
of life, to the strengthening of our morale, living 
under a new sense of responsibility for the 
larger life of the community to whose interests 
our own private lives must yield. I remember 
a great speech of John Stuart Mill's in the House 
of Commons which raised its atmosphere higher 
than I almost ever knew. His theme was the 
thought for posterity. Stanley Jevons' alarm- 
ist book on the prospect before the nation when 
the Coal Measures should be exhausted, had just 
come out. Mill made a solemn appeal to the 
nation, while still in the full enjoyment of the 
output of the coal fields and of all their vast 
resources, to pay off the National Debt, and 
save posterity from a burden that might be 
beyond their means. In those words of a pro- 
phetic soul, ringing still in my ear, I seem to 
hear a challenge to us to-day to think of 



The Nations on their Trial 187 

posterity, and to grudge no sacrifice to reduce 
the intolerable burden of debt that we are 
laying up for the unborn generations whose 
trustees we are, and to tax ourselves to the 
utmost height to do it. It is our patriotic duty 
to husband our resources, at the sacrifice of 
many wonted personal indulgences. It must 
be the nation first and ourselves last ; posterity 
first, ourselves last. To hand down this dear 
old England of ours to our children's children, 
her soil contaminated by no invading foot, her 
good name tarnished by no word or deed in 
our conduct of the war, the battle for a righteous 
cause righteously fought out to a peace in which 
they shall live to bless us for our fidelity in our 
stewardship of the national life in our day of 
hard things, this is the call to us. It is a call 
to a patriotic self-devotion, to answer which 
in the spirit of the dear boys at the front is a 
little thing compared with what they do and 
bear in the gift of their very lives ; but it will 
be to us what their immolation of self on the 
altar of their country is to them, a refining fire* 



THANKS DUE 
By W. G. Tarrant, B.A. 

IS it not a bad thing, every way, when people 
who are capable of knowing the good they 
receive are slow to give thanks where thanks are 
due ? Living creatures have been classified in 
many different respects ; let us suggest one more. 
Suppose we consider them from the point of view 
of the capacity to be grateful. There are some 
animals, but evidently not the loveliest or happiest 
who seem to be quite insensible on this side of their 
nature. The wolf's way is to snatch greedily and 
devour hastily, and pay no attention to the feeder. 
And there are myriads of wriggling things of many 
kinds, which, so far as one can see, feel no grati- 
tude while they gnaw. 

Lovelier and happier creatures, companions and 
helpers of man, draw near him also in this regard. 
Many a British trooper to-day knows well how 
unmistakably a horse well treated will respond by 
all the means in its power, nuzzling up to him 
whenever he comes near, and showing its pleasure 



Thanks Due 189 

with eyes and ears and neck and tail. Every- 
body knows the grateful temper of the dog ; we 
are told that other domesticated animals, notably 
the elephant, and even the camel, show a similar 
sense of favours bestowed. The mere cage-bird, 
as many a child can tell, gives thanks for the boon 
of food and kindly greeting. 

Would it not be strange, then, something ap- 
proaching the monstrous, if men who gladly recog- 
nize in these creatures the presence of so beautiful 
an addition to the delights of living, should them- 
selves be so mean as to take benefits without due 
acknowledgment ? Some there may be, indeed, 
who are by nature too dull to know they are bene- 
fited. Some become dulled by harsh experiences. 
There are others, it must be feared, who have so 
little exercised their better feelings, so long played 
the part of wolf or maggot in the State, selfishly 
snatching and devouring, that decent people may 
well give up hope of them. The sooner their 
breed is exterminated the better. Non ragioniam 
di lor- — let us pass them by. 

Our appeal here is to quite a different class, 
to people who know better, and who with a little 
self-discipline would soon do better. It is to 
reading, thinking, brooding, much-imagining peo- 
ple that these remarks are offered. Such people 
are assuredly neither hopelessly besotted, nor 
incurably selfish. Their sensibility is keen, per- 
haps too keen. They suffer much — not by any 



190 Problems of the War 

means solely on their own account. Endowed, 
perhaps, with a more active imagination than their 
neighbours, they look far beyond their immediate 
circle and share the miseries of unseen multitudes. 
They are prone to picture coming disasters, while 
others are absorbed in present duties. 

Imagination is good, if used well ; but if we 
turn it the wrong way it may play mischief with 
us. ' If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars.' 
Much foreboding blinds the eyes to actual advan- 
tages. What if we were to lift our thoughts, daily, 
from pondering over-much the dark and evil 
things in the world ? Such things are there, but 
they are not the only things there. We read that 
when Jesus came to his disciples from lonely 
wrestling with his life's problem in Gethsemane, 
he found them ' sleeping for sorrow,' and that 
his word to them was ' Rise ! ' Some of the most 
earnest lovers of good need that word to-day. 
Earnest men the disciples were, no doubt ; but, 
while their Master wisely and devoutly sought 
new strength, they were sinking into torpor and 
paralysis. 

Our country's fate, and our own, demands at 
this moment that all sober-minded citizens shall 
preserve their utmost vigour of body and mind. 
One preservative is just this of being thankful. 
Granted that ' good things ' are not so plentiful as 
we should like — it is a ' good thing to give thanks.' 
Like all really good things it is ' good for some- 



Thanks Due 191 

thing.' Not only beautiful in itself, and just to 
the benefactors, it opens up a new stream of 
healthful moods, such as always spring from pure 
affection and increase the energy of the mind. 

Who in England (let each ask himself) will be 
a mean creature to-day ? In sober fact we have 
around us a spectacle of greater heroism, more 
courage of the right sort, more abounding gener- 
osity, than any man living ever saw before. Mean 
indeed must he be who cannot see it, and he who 
sees it clearly will hail it emphatically. We, 
especially, who are debarred from taking the share 
we could wish in this emergency, will not be slow 
to applaud those who, being able, are doing more. 
' For what we have received,' — the children's 
formula after dinner is not too childish, let us say, 
for a man. His fuller understanding and resources 
should only serve to raise the sentiment to a higher 
expression. 

I ask myself where I should properly begin when 
I think over the long roll of England's helpers 
and mine. Could I but distinguish all who com- 
pose this great multitude when should I leave off ? 
Well, I think I perceive where the first acknow- 
ledgment should be made ; and I believe that 
many thoughtful people will share my feeling in 
this matter. 

Surely, that is the crowning service which gives 
highest significance to all the rest. Agonizing as 
this war is, let us be profoundly grateful for the 



192 Problems of the War 

fact that we were enabled to enter upon it with 
a clear call of Duty in our ears. Other wars we 
have known, too many of them, when such a call 
was — to say the least — far from clear to a great 
part of the people. On this occasion, whatever 
our woes and sacrifices, unprecedented in our 
history, the nation has not had to suffer that worst 
of public calamities, a divided mind. 

As we recall the emotions of those terribly tense 
days before war was declared, we remember how 
bitterly mingled they were. We not only felt 
the most painful anxiety as to its possible results 
to us and ours ; we not only felt, as it were, the 
trembling of the balance in which our country's 
destinies lay ; we had deep searchings of heart as 
to what we ought to do.. Was it really necessary 
that Great Britain should intervene ? Had our 
representatives entangled us in policies that were 
questionable, if not culpable, discordant with 
genuine international comity ? In the rapid 
developments of those fateful days had any of 
them been guilty of wanton provocation or stupid 
neglect ? Among the motives that urged them 
and us toward the conflict of arms, were the 
stronger really the meaner ? Was our opposition 
to Germany grounded at bottom chiefly upon 
commercial jealousy and greed ? Had the malice 
of our own * Yellow Press ' at least as much to do 
as German war-fanaticism in bringing our two 
empires to that pass ? 



Thanks Due 193 

Questions such as these raced to and fro in our 
minds as we turned each morning to the papers 
to catch what we could of the doings of the diplo- 
matists — as we read, and talked, and were silent 
— as we longed, and prayed, and waited — hoping 
against hope while the sands ran out, pinning our 
desperate faith to the good sense of the few as 
against the mad passions of the many, refusing to 
accept the fact that (in our day !), after so much 
had been said and done by loyal promoters of 
international friendship and { peace on earth,' the 
great European Powers could engage in a thing 
so frightful, so shameful, as war. 

Those were sad hours, and many a sad hour has 
passed since then ; but for some of us c the bitter- 
ness of death ' was passed, when, from the agony 
of suspense and heart-rending doubts, we were 
delivered into the clear light of what ought to 
be done. Soon and conclusively we learned — we 
have never since had to reverse the verdict but 
rather to strengthen it — that whatever blame 
may lie at our door, the nation did all it could 
through its representatives to prevent this war. 
It was made clear to us, and the various docu- 
ments published since by the respective Powers, 
Germany's included, establish fully what we 
then learned, that the one Power that was bent 
on war was Germany; that she would neither 
accept pacific proposals from others nor put them 
forward herself. And as if to make assurance 



194 Problems of the War 

doubly sure, Germany at once tore up its pledges 
and entered upon a course of abominable lawless- 
ness and outrage. Were we cynics, which I hope 
we are not, we might thank our enemy for fling- 
ing into our hands the brief for that humanity 
which has been so wantonly assailed. 

We, common folk, felt the strain of those days. 
Can we think what it must have been to those in 
places of high responsibility ? The last thing to 
be charged upon the Government of the day was 
military ambition. Most of its members loathed 
the prospect of war ; they risked popularity, and 
even some reputation as prudent guardians of 
the realm, in their desire to slacken the pace in 
armaments. Yet, by a kind of irony, this fateful 
decision lay in their hands. Germany obviously 
reckoned on their reluctance. When interven- 
tion looked unavoidable, she offered terms if they 
would keep out. Knowing what we know now, 
how thankful we must be that they scorned the 
shameful bribe ! 

Yes, let us heartily remember with thanks those 
national leaders and representatives whose probity 
sustained the best traditions of British policy. 
Let us heartily thank those also who, without 
distinction of party, helped to make the issues 
so clear that the nation became one in the deter- 
mination to see justice done, let come what may. 

We have had sad thoughts often, in these long 
months, but no doubts as to the path of our duty. 



Thanks Due 195 

We have sad thoughts from day to day, not arising 
only out of the tragic story of wounds, suffering, 
and death. No honest man can pretend that all 
has been well in England, that bad things have 
not been said and done among us, and good things 
left undone. If we could wrap ourselves in phari- 
saic self-complacency as we look, not at German 
lawlessness, but at vice, drunkenness, grasping, 
slander and spite at home, the thanks we tender 
would be shallow indeed. But knowing our 
national faults, there is a redeeming force, surely, 
in the conviction that, however unworthy of the 
high task assigned us, it has been so assigned. 
The cause for which we stand is that of Right, 
Law, Good-faith ; thanks to all who helped to 
make it ours. 

Thanks, also, to searchers and students, not 
only in our own land or among the Allies, but 
especially across the Atlantic, who have sifted 
the case impartially, and given so emphatic a 
support to our contention. Thanks to writers of 
books, journalists, public speakers, who have 
diffused the facts far and wide, so that our people's 
efforts should not be blindly passionate, but clear- 
sighted and based on understanding. To know 
what they are doing, and why, is fundamental to 
all the rest. Everyone who is single-hearted in 
the aim to secure (as we understand it) the highest 
of all good for our posterity and the whole human 
race, is set in a light that transfigures him and 



iq6 Problems of the War 

all he does. The hackneyed term, ' Glory, 5 is far 
too feeble to express the blessedness of those who 
live, and work, and strive, and suffer, and die in 
a cause like this. 

' For that the people offered themselves willing- 
ly ' — so ran the exultant song of Deborah, that 
Mother in Israel. Mothers in England, in all 
parts of the kingdom, in all parts of the Empire, 
have seen their willing sons depart in hosts hither- 
to unimagined among us. In the fields, in the 
trenches, among the rocks and sands, on the 
mine-sown seas, they have wrestled, and are 
wrestling unto blood, that victory may be on the 
side of Right. Do we mourn over their hardships 
and pains ? Well may we, for it is through these 
that our own physical security, our very life, is 
preserved. But with marvellous good cheer the 
soldiers and sailors themselves stand up faithfully 
to the day's call. Rough they may be, many of 
them — though our gentlest, tenderest, most re- 
fined are also there — but their courage and per- 
sistence shames the pessimism of some sad folk 
(and some malicious ones) at home. England 
was said to be enervated ; her children were de- 
generate ! The facts give the He to all such 
croakings. Thanks to the brave lads ; they have 
not shamed their stock. We, who have seen their 
letters from the front, know how sensible, how 
quietly confident they are that justice will triumph. 
We have met them wounded, blinded, maimed ; 



Thanks Due 197 

how patient, how cheery, how ready to catch at 
any chance of a laugh, how modest ! Who in 
England will lie down at night without unspeak- 
able thoughts of them ? 

And far away there are like remembrances. 
What an overwhelming answer has been given to 
those who doubted the solidarity of our free Em- 
pire ! In all days to come, the names of Canada, 
Australia, New Zealand, South Africa — aye, and 
India — will be dearer to us than some of us ever 
dreamed they could be. 

Silence rests on many a wooden cross, on many 
a shapeless mound, on the face of the waters, 
where the unre turning lie. We believe it is well 
with them ; we trust that hereafter all will be 
well with them and us. 

If our nation could but utter the ' Thanks Due,' 
there would rise such an anthem as the world 
never heard. Some day, perhaps, our poets will 
attempt that glorious theme. Many a rousing, 
heartening, soothing verse they have given us ; 
some while singing have fallen on sleep and will 
sing for us no new songs any more. Thank God, 
it never occurred to any of them to make a ' Hymn 
of Hate.' 

I said c Thank God.' Let it be said reverently, 
from the heart. Amid all our thanks — to leaders, 
organizers, to fighters, to healers, to workers, to 
steadfast Allies, to friends in neutral lands — they 




198 Problems of the War 

who think deepest will look upward. ' I thank — 
Something,' said Leslie Stephen, the lonely Agnos- 
tic Apologist, when thinking what a blessing had 
been his in the beloved wife he had just lost. 
Unable to see clearly a Giver, he acknowledged 
with full heart the wonder of the gift. Who of 
us claims, amid all this darkness and storm, to 
see clearly the eternal Giver ? Yet that there is 
a Giver, these precious gifts, moving us to grateful 
thoughts, come as daily evidence. 

If optimistic faith was ever easy, it has its test- 
ing hour now ; but was it ? We knew, did we not, 
that the long course of this world's evolution had 
been a troubled one. We knew of much pain, 
and sin, and disappointment ; of things terrible 
and seeming monstrous. Yet even Huxley had 
told us that the stern order of things was, on the 
whole, beneficent. Surely, our faith was not after 
all a no-faith, only a shallow satisfaction arising 
from fairly easy conditions for ourselves ! Let 
us thank God for our unconquerable soul. Let 
us dare even to thank God that we have not been 
let off our due share in the cost of man's long and 
painful education. We praise ancient heroes ; 
let us try to be modern heroes, and if that is not 
possible, at least we can praise those who are. It 
will put manlier moods into our hearts, and add 
new vigour to our mind and muscle as we go to 
the particular piece of work committed to us. 
For we all have something to do. 



THE WAR IN WHICH THERE IS NO 
DISCHARGE 1 

By Joseph Wood. 

THE men who have enlisted for this great 
war ; the men who are training here in 
camp that they may be fit and ready for the day 
when they are called to the front ; the men who 
are standing so valiantly in the trenches and by 
the guns ; the wounded who have come home for 
healing and rest that they may fight again, 2 would 
none of them be pleased were they told that they 
are engaged in a war from which there would be 
no discharge. Rather are they all looking forward 
to a victory and a peace which, ere long, shall send 

1 An address given in Camp, and also to a company of 
convalescent soldiers. 

2 See the knight in the old ballad : — 

Fight on my men, says Sir Andrew Barton, 

I am hurt, but I am not slain ; 
I'll lay me down, and bleed awhile, 

And then I'll rise and fight again. 



200 Problems of the War 

them back to their homes and wonted pursuits. 
They are not professional soldiers (except a small 
proportion) who make soldiering their life-work. 
They have volunteered for this war only. They 
do not love fighting. They hate the thought of 
killing, the horrors, the brutalities and the fierce 
lust of battle. Especially they who know the 
agony of biting shells as they burst and tear their 
way into the flesh, the crushing of bones under a 
storm of bombs, the shrieks and yells of terrified 
men and horses; who have heard the groans of the 
dying in foul trenches, who have seen that which 
sickens and shocks, these men would be appalled 
if they learned that this must go on as long as they 
live since it is a war without discharge for its 
soldiers. No, for they are sustained by two 
great ideas — the conviction of the righteousness 
of the cause for which they are offering their 
lives, and the hope of such a triumphant issue 
as shall free them and their country from the 
perils of war unto many generations. 

The young men of this country are as a rule 
lovers of the ways and works of peace. What 
was it moved them to fling themselves by the 
million into the fighting line, heeding not the risk 
of burning wounds and ghastly death ? I am 
proud to think it was an imperative sense of duty. 
Certainly it was not any hope of gain or glory for 
themselves. The desire of fame and promotion 
was not in their hearts. Duty called them and 



War in which there is no Discharge 201 

they went. Nay, it was something more than 
duty. The love of England, the honour of Eng- 
land, the soul of England was in their bones like 
a fire, and they answered as brave men and true. 
It was even more than that. It was the wrong, 
the incredible wrong accompanied by the violent 
cruelties done to an innocent nation by a neigh- 
bouring people who were as solemnly pledged to 
her protection as we ourselves, so that our young 
recruits said in their hearts — ' Heaven and earth 
shall pass away before the crime against Belgium 
is forgotten until it is redressed.' It was the lust 
of world-domination tearing up treaties as scraps 
of paper, setting at defiance all laws of humanity, 
all pleas of justice, all ideals of freedom, and all 
canons of civilization, that nerved the heart of 
young England and turned the lovers of peace 
into the warriors of God. For never doubt, it is 
a holy war in which you are engaged. Since it 
is a war for Freedom and Justice and Righteous 
dealing between nations, for the plighted word, 
fox the idea of Eternal Right as against the idea 
that Might is Lord and King — since it is these 
things it is God's kingdom for which you are 
fighting. Abraham Lincoln was asked during 
the American Civil War whether he felt sure that 
God was on his side, and he answered, that he 
hoped at any rate he was on God's side. So it is 
with England. God has given her the noble task 
of fighting for the liberty of Europe and for the 



202 Problems of the War 

future of civilization. It is God's war for Right 
against Wrong to which you have given your- 
selves. I speak to some here who have already 
fought in more than one bloody battle, and have 
fought like heroes. All England blesses you and 
admires you. No coward hearts are yours. Come 
victory, come defeat, it is well with you. Dangers, 
disappointment, pain, sickness have not wearied 
you. You have faced these things as well as ever 
men did on earth. And it is no shame to you if 
you are looking forward to a time, please God not 
far distant, when discharged from war you will 
come home bringing the garlands of peace in 
your hands. 

Yet I speak of a war from which there is no 
discharge — the war of goodness against evil which 
has gone on from the beginning, the eternal war 
of light and heaven against darkness and the pit,, 
the war of truth against falsehood, of spirit against 
flesh, of justice, freedom, and humanity against 
cruelty, slavery, and barbarism. It is a war in 
which we are all called to bear a part. No man 
is exempt. No excuses are allowed. This world 
would have been hell long ago had not men been 
faithful unto death in that conflict. It is a fact 
of wide significance that men have always refused 
to be reconciled with wrong. All history is the 
record of men and nations rising up in some way 
or other to fight the foul things of lust and greed 
and lies and selfishness. The present war with 






War in which there is no Discharge 203 

Germany is simply one chapter in that age-long 
record. Sad and shocking as is this war, wicked 
in its origin and wicked above all wickedness in 
many of its phases, my clear and strong convic- 
tion remains that it is not outside the will and 
purpose of God. Like many of the apparently 
destructive and disorderly forces of nature which 
are yet held within the wide compass of natural 
law, so this fearful scourge from which all the 
world is suffering is held within the all-embracing 
rule of God. When the Psalmist called upon the 
whole creation to join in praising God — sun and 
moon, men and angels, birds and beasts, flying 
cloud and flowing water, the ' spangled heaven ' 
and the fruits of the earth, he did not exclude the 
darker and more dreadful things of nature. 
4 Dragons and all deeps ; fire and hail, snow and 
vapour ; stormy wind fulfilling his word.'' For even 
these declare the excellency of the Power that 
called them into being and praise him by their 
obedience. Dragons and all deeps, fire and hail, 
and stormy winds, at first sight the outbreak of 
anarchy in the midst of a realm of order, are in 
reality an expression of the same Divine Will that 
guides the stars in their courses and the seasons 
in their unvarying march. 

This war is no strange thing that has happened 
to our world ; this is not the first time that great 
nations have been in conflict, nor the first time 
that conflicting ideas have come to grips in the 



204 Problems of the War 

arbitrament of war. There are conspicuous in- 
stances in which we clearly see that war played 
the part of purifying fire and stormy winds, the 
mission of clearing away and cleansing in their 
blast hot fetid airs and vile miasmas and corrupt- 
ing social disease, giving room and chance for 
healthier life. 

Without going back to the ancient empires of 
the Eastern world, Assyria, Babylon, Chaldea, etc., 
let us recall two events in European history. Look 
at Imperial Rome, the mistress of the world, 
when forgetting her glorious past she fell into lust 
and luxury and corruption that ate out her heart 
and fibre, and made her a curse to humanity. 
Then came the stormy winds, fire and hail, 
dragons and all deeps, fulfilling his word. On they 
come, Goths and Huns and Vandals, wave after 
wave, breaking up the rotten defences of a decay- 
ing world ; on they come, devastating provinces, 
wrecking cities, shattering the old fabric of society, 
and establishing in its place a freer, simpler, nobler 
order of things. By the process of war, Rome had 
to make way for new and vigorous nations, in- 
stinct with a healthier spirit, and the ruin in which 
she perished had a sanction which was justified by 
the event. 

Or look at the redemption and unity of Italy — 
almost in our own time, and associated with the 
names of Garibaldi, Mazzini, and Cavour. The 
Austrian tyranny was not broken but by immense 



War in which there is no Discharge 205 

sacrifices of blood and treasure. Italy's libera- 
tion came in by the gates of death ; freedom and 
justice reigned at last, but only as the storm 
cleared the land of its oppressors. The sufferings 
and sacrifices of that time were not destructive 
only, but reparative and life-giving. When the 
youth of Italy rushed on the Austrian guns 
were they fools or redeemers ? Redeemers if the 
Cross be true. The passion for a great cause 
which leads men to the complete renunciation of 
self was in their hearts. Every man who died 
for Italy died for God's great cause of freedom 
and justice, and in dying added to Italy a new 
promise of salvation. 

These also are incidents and chapters of the 
great war which goes on through all the ages in a 
thousand different forms — the war in which there 
is no discharge. For the fight of good with evil, 
of light with darkness, of right with wrong, of 
the higher against the lower, is a fight which is 
carried on in times of peace as well as in times of 
war. The trumpet-call sounds in all ears — c Sol- 
diers of Christ, arise.' Not only amid the thunder 
of guns and the shrieking of shells, but in the social 
and civil life of nations, in the hearts and lives of 
individuals, and in myriads of homes the war is 
waged by which heaven is lost or won. It is a 
war for which we may refuse to fight. It is a 
battle we may decline even as deserters drop out 
of the firing line. But I am not speaking of 



206 Problems of the War 

cowards. • The Battle of Life ' is a metaphor 
which all earnest men at some time or other in 
their lives realize as true. It is a metaphor which 
recalls to every man parts of his own history. 
No true man escapes. Everywhere the fight is 
set with wrong. From first to last man is found 
in circumstances that call for the soldier-heart. 
The choices we make are often stained with our 
heart's blood. Of course there are all sorts of 
enemies, and all sorts of weapons. Passions, im- 
pulses, appetites, have to be wrestled with and 
mastered ; painful renunciations are called for 
which pierce to the soul ; inherited tendencies to 
evil, or gloom, or violence have to be overcome. 
There are no smooth, untroubled lots. At every 
instant, at every step the soul must be guided 
and guarded by its fixed design of righteousness. 

Out there in the wide world man is called upon 
to battle with the wrong, the iniquity, the selfish- 
ness, the injustice, which stalk up and down as if 
Satan were Lord and King. In that battle is all 
the tragedy, yes, and all the glory of life. In all 
men you find the instinct of rebellion against in- 
justice. No passion is so strong in the human 
heart as the passion for justice. There is not a 
civilized man who when he acts unjustly but 
feels that the crown of his manhood is rolled in 
the dust. 

For the greatest battle of all is that which goes 
on within; inside all other battles we are fight- 



War in which there is no Discharge 207 

Ing there is the battle within ourselves. It is 
the battle between contending principles within 
the single heart ; that dialogue as it were between 
two voices which is one of the profoundest mys- 
teries of our nature. The higher and the lower 
wrestle for the mastery in every man. We have 
to win a victory for the better self over the self- 
seeking self, the intolerant self, the gloomy, fretful 
self, the vile and treacherous self. And every man 
in the great army of God is here to overcome — not 
to be overcome — to conquer wrong and not to be 
conquered. Within is the foe to be met and mas- 
tered. The centre of the battle to which we are 
called is our own heart ; it is a battle for self -con- 
quest ; it is the winning of our own allegiance to 
truth, goodness, and God. Yet no one of himself 
alone can achieve the mastery of himself. We feel 
our need of some better help than our own right 
arm. 'The best of all is, God is with us,' said 
John Wesley. Divine energies that brace the mind 
and heart are at our call as the reserve forces of a 
great army. Christ, the captain of the Lord's hosts 
is one with us in the struggle. Marching under his 
banner we receive of his dauntless spirit, and are 
1 more than conquerors through him that loved us,' 
and who stood by our side in that war from which 
there is no discharge. To live lives of heroic devo- 
tion to all that is brave, and best and true ; to live 
as Sons of God called to battle with foes within and 
foes without is the appeal which is made to the 



208 



Problems of the War 



highest and best you dream or feel. Here is a 
victory to be won which will test the soldier heart 
to the full extent. Fear not. More are they that 
be for us than they that be against us. If in that 
war there is no discharge, nevertheless in that war 
there is no failure. c He always wins who sides 
with God.' 



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